Talk:Technology in Foreign Language

From School Computing

3-4-06 Hi Deby, it's great to have such a thorough description of the standards for world language instruction. I'm curious if you obtained them from a source which allows for their open distribution? Do you need to give credit to the source? is it okay to have copied them directly? Also, because they are so long, I would suggest moving them to a separate page, and on your main page just have the main headings for the standards, and then link into the detailed page maybe. -demetri

3-20-06
Hi Deby,
One of my Emerging Technologies sections is on Handhelds and I discovered that this tool has been extremely helpful for many ESL students. Students can simply enter new and unfamiliar vocabulary into their handhelds to assist them in word recognition. Here's one of the software that can make this possible - PocketLingo ESL. PocketLingo ESL is a learning dictionary software for Palm OS featuring The American Heritage Dictionary for Learners of English. You may want to include this in your chapter.

For your 'Effective Uses of Examples' section, you may want to categorize it. Like this:

Clip Art

• Create a greeting card in the target language using clipart with a cultural element.
• Create a story, an episode from a story, or a poem to illustrate with clip art. All projects are printed and compiled into a class book.
• Create an advertisement for a culturally significant product, using scanned or clip-art images to illustrate the text.
  
• etc...

Word Processing

• Create a menu using a word processing program.
  
• etc..

Overall, I think you have a lot of great information here!
~emilie

3-23-06 Hi Deby, your page is one of the most interesting to me. I didn't realize how foreign language could be so enriched by technology, particularly in areas outside of just vocabulary/grammar, such as the culture. You have some wonderful content, most notably the top ten list and examples of integration, but I feel that they're overpowered, both in the table of contents and the main page, by the listing of standards. Perhaps you could reduce the standards size or link to them instead. I wracked my brain thinking about new ways of using technology in FL. I was curious if it has been used yet to cheaply and easily communicate by voice with students in the country of interest. With the Internet, you no longer need to worry about long distance charges, instead using a program like Skype (http://www.skype.com/) or Google Talk (http://www.google.com/talk/). -Tom

3-24-06 Hey Deby. I really like your site. I liked how you went into such detail about about the email tool. I thought that was really helpful to someone who was just learning how to integrate technology. I also really liked your list of ideas of how to use technology, they were really good examples and were specific to your discipline. Some suggestions I had were to: maybe add bullets to the formatting of your standards or perhaps leave more of that to the standards page, join together the web resources and the internet links since they are related to each other and maybe add some examples of webquests. I also thought another barrier you could add would be helping students to distinguish between stereotypes and true culture on internet sources. Great job!!!! ~Kim

3-24-2006 Hi Deby! Wow this looks great, you have put so much information into this page. A couple quick suggestions:

• Your " ACTFL performance guidelines" sections - you may want to use bullets instead of the way you are doing it now. Looking at your table of contents, it looks like you have subsections for " SUPERIOR" through " NOVICE LOW" but if you go to that section there is nothing there. Maybe I am just reading this wrong and you plan to add more, but as it stands now it looks confusing.
• In your "webcasts" section - maybe I am missing it, but are there any webcasts?
• In your "software" section - I think you may want to include links to these pieces of software if you are promoting them
• In your assessment area - I think Demetri wants 5 questions, you only have 4. I would hate for you to lose point over something as little as that. :)

Overall, looks great. So much better than mine. Keep up the good work! -Greg

Deby, I really like your chapter, especially because my mom is FL teacher and all of the information that you have provided can be very useful and helpful. I want to highlight 3 points that stand out to me. 1-the 10 reasons... 2-issues and problems... 3-current events...I feel that these sections are very important to any reader. The 10 reasons are awesome which grabs the readers attention. The issues and problems is also useful because it lets the reader know what to expect regarding future problems which we all want to avoid. And the current events is super. I think we all need to be aware, updated, and current (hahah) with the current events that revolve around events correlating with the FL curriculum and most importantly the content. Good luck! -Aimee 3-24-06

3/24/06 Debie, your page is looking really good. However, there are a few suggestions i wanted to make. First, i think you should consider moving your 'ACTFL' guidelines to another page and then provide a link. Also, i have no clue what these guidelines are or what they mean. You may want to consider providing some background information here as well as a description of each standard they provide for people like me. Second, i think one of the most important jobs of a foreign language teacher, in addition to teaching the foreign language is to provide instruction on foreign cultures where that language is spoken. I noticed that this is one of your standards, however you havent provided many suggestions or resources for accomplishing this, you may want to consider developing a section of your page specifically for this standard. Also, as i know you teach Spanish, if you want to you can provide a link to the the page Kim and i have set up that covers sites that support instruction on Latin Lmerica. Great job. ~ Matt

3-25-06 Hi Deby! I've posted my feedback for you as an audio file: Deby's Feedback From Demetri. Please be aware it's a fairly large (1.2 Mb) mp3 audio file, so it may take awhile to download, and you need an audio player to listen to it, such as Windows Media Player or QuickTime installed. If you have any problems or questions, please contact me. Thanks, Demetri