It has been a tough week, but all good and more time than first thought to send out this bumper newsletter, which this week sees with active learning, escape rooms, slam poetry, and real-time transcription.
Please keep sending us links and ideas. I usually dedicate a couple of hours each week to creating this newsletter and it's just so rewarding when I get a little note (even if it’s to point out a typo) or another link in return. I know I'm competing for attention, but even if you skim through and click on at least one thing that is useful in your teaching, research, or just attracts your interest, then it has been worthwhile and I thank you.
It feels as if we're approaching the busiest time of the semester, with Thanksgiving just around the corner and time quickly running out on our courses. We need to consider our students' workload, think about the time that colleagues have, and leave a little for ourselves. It's all about keeping energy levels going and not putting an undue burden on each other.
Why don't you show the video below in class and ask your students how it is going?
Thank you for reading, we really appreciate your support and would love to hear more about what you like and what you've seen that might be useful to share. If you have anything you'd like to include in future issues, let us know.
Students on the 82-305 course "French in its Social Contexts" created and performed their own Slam poetry directed by our own Sebastien Dubreil and a visit from Jenny Salgado, a Montréalaise of Haitian descent who spent a week in Pittsburgh and worked with students in the course on the form, its intention, and its craft. You can watch them on YouTube in their 360 VR form.
People, Places, and Things
This fantastic photo series is about the vending machines of Tokyo.
There were a few articles in the FLTMag that caught my eye, including this interview with Gretchen Aiyangar who teaches in the CTL Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Gretchen has been creating escape rooms with her students to promote less commonly taught languages. There's a really good description of how the puzzles were put together and it's certainly a template for ideas we could all try out. I don't know about you, but there's something a little disconcerting about looking across your classroom and seeing laptop backs facing you and everyone behind them looking down typing furiously. To mix things up I put a tin of sharpies on the table and encouraged the students to doodle on big sheets of newsprint, sometimes they add their notes, diagrams, timelines or just draw pictures as they listen. Here are a few pictures, used with kind permission.
...and here's a great article encouraging you to go back to handwriting and talks about the benefits of doing so.
53 percent of Americans now own a smartphone by the age of 11 - I've written about smartphone use in schools before, it's contentious, with some school districts putting in place an outright ban whilst I subscribe to a responsible use approach, these are powerful computers that can be used to enhance learning. I would be interested in your thoughts? Are we naive to see mobile devices as anything but a distraction?
A special issue of Language Learning & Technology on New Developments in Virtual Exchange in Foreign Language Education contains an article titled Exploring multimedia, mobile learning, and place-based learning in linguacultural education written by our former MA student Yiting Han who is now a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona.
I feel as if I may have mentioned this before, but if you want a transcription app that really works, then I highly recommend Otter.Ai which is currently creating a storm with near-perfect real-time transcription. My students on the 82-285 Podcasting course are using it to record interviews, they say it is perfect for looking back over a conversation, searchable, and includes timestamps. Couldn't be better.
On Screen
Incredible time-lapse tour of the Dutch city of Leiden, showing amazing detail and fascinating insight into the movement and business of this location.
Finally, just turn up the volume for the wonderful "Maestro" from Bloom Pictures