It is my firm belief that, whereas teaching takes place in the classroom, learning happens beyond class time. To this end, technology and web-based online learning help motivate today’s students and offer them the chance to stay engaged in the study of the language. Investing in harmoniously incorporating the use of technology into the classroom, furthering the use of web-based tools and enhancing the way students access content-based material, positively impact on students’ learning experience. I’ve dedicated a good portion of the last few years to exploring blended-learning opportunities and developing materials to be integrated in my elementary and intermediate Italian courses. Each project received ad-hoc funding and resulted in presentations at conferences or symposia: Bryn Mawr ’15, Five College Inc. ’16 and ’17, NeMLA ’17 and ’18. (Click on titles to be redirected to external websites)
The inspiration behind this project was threefold: to create a course largely based on audio materials (instead of written ones), to develop a practical learning tool for the students and to explore non-traditional, interdisciplinary ways to study Italian.
Students may play audio tracks on their portable mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) on the go, instead of using their laptop computers. By facilitating the way in which students prepare for class and by creating assignments that are aurally stimulating and visually appealing, the course seeks to elicit a more active and engaged participation from students.
Since one of the aims was to make materials easily accessible, I optimized the Green Italian website to be used on a smartphone or a tablet. As such, students may “pin” the URL on the desktop of their device so as to access the website at the touch of a finger.
This 2-year project was developed collaboratively with two colleagues from the Five-College consortium (M. Svaldi, Mount Holyoke C., and Maria Succi-Hempstead, Smith C.). In this project, we wanted to foster students’ learning through authentic and original materials in the target language, and by offering opportunities to actively practice the language beyond class time. The materials and website we created allow students to students can read, listen, write, watch, explore vocab, and review grammar, as well as offer ideas for class discussion. Final Report including students’ evaluations and feedback.
As part of this first collaborative blended-learning project (same team as above), we created new materials (approximately 200 new items: dialogues, audios of dialogues, grammar tutorials, review quizzes etc.) to be used with our Elementary Italian textbook (Avanti!, McGraw-Hill) in order to provide students with tailor-made opportunities to review, practice and consolidate the instruction they receive in class. We specifically intended to tackle the three linguistic skills our students mostly need to work on: writing, listening and speaking. For each one of these skills we develop audio/visual material to support and guide students throughout the whole learning process outside of class.
Below is the video of the presentation on this project given at the Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference (Bryn Mawr College, 2015).
