Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category
Filed Under Tools
Chatterous.com is a great service for creating chat rooms on the fly. Let’s say you’re in a group that’s working on a project together. You’d like to stay in touch as you progress through the different stages of the project, but you don’t want to have to swap IMs, emails, or cell phone numbers. You just want to be in touch for the short-term.
Chatterous groups are a great answer to this scenario. Here’s how it works:
1) Go to chatterous.com and click on the big orange button to create a new group. Fill out the name of your group, a shortname for your unique URL, a description, and specify whether you’d like the group to be public or private.
2) The next screen explains all of the ways you can add people to the group, but if you’re on a computer, the easiest way will be to send your friends the unique URL in an email. My URL is so simple, I just tell my friends, “go to chatterous dot com slash final project”.
3) When a new person arrives at the group, they’ll show up on the right hand side as a guest. Guests can immediately start typing in the chat and choose how they’d like to be notified of new comments.
They can choose to be notified via IM or Email.
4) if guests decide to be a permanent member of the group, they’ll have to create their own chatterous account. Click on the “become a member” button and fill out these fields.
Members of the group can choose to be notified via SMS (text message) when somebody in the group makes a change. This is what we use in the department when a teacher wants to find me and I’m out and about. They drop a message in our chatterous group and I get a text message on my phone telling me where help is needed.
Chatterous.com can also be used as a backchannel during presentations and lectures. Listeners can ask questions, ask for clarification, or comment on what is being said without disrupting the presenter.
Filed Under Tools
In early February, AppJet.com released a real-time collaborative text editing tool. What does that mean? It means that in less than a minute both you and I can be writing on the same page, seeing the same notes, and editing each others’ work.
How to use it:
1) Go to EtherPad.com and click on the orange button to create a new pad. EtherPad will assign a random “slug” to your URL, such as x3b6ds9s. Better yet, think of a URL that you would *like* to use and type it straight into your browser. I want to create an EtherPad for the World Language Lab, so I’ll type http://etherpad.com/wll. Immediately, a message pops up telling me that nobody has snagged this URL yet, so I can have it. Great! I click “Create pad”.
2) Now I’m inside the pad and I see a sidebar with some expandable sections on the right and a big white text area on the left. I click on “edit name/color” to write my first name. I want to invite another faculty member to the party, so I’ll click on the “invite more people” link and enter the email for, say, Mr. Farver.
3) Mr. Farver gets an email that looks like this:
He clicks on the link and now he’s working on the same pad I am!
4) Mr. Farver and I can type messages to each other in the chat window on the right while we work together on an agenda for next Tuesday’s meeting. At any point, we can save a version of our document, which will be saved just in case we need to go back to an earlier version.
So that’s it. It might look pretty simple, but technologically, this is quite an accomplishment. Just imagine that somewhere out there in the big wild internet, there’s a database that is keeping track of each and every character I type, each carriage return, each and every backspace, copy, or paste, etc. etc. EtherPad supports an infinite number of undo actions. And it’s doing it for multiple users at once!
Ms. Jackson and I are creating a list of possible uses for EtherPad. I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish with this tool to make language learning more fun and lasting.
Filed Under Tools
For all you Mac labs out there, have you ever noticed that the display brightness falls to the lowest setting, without warning or reason? I think* it may have something to do with Workgroup Manager, but here’s a little trick from Matt Danger that might solve the problem. I’m going to try it later this week.
Filed Under French, Tools, YuperStars
ARD is not the easiest tool to learn, but teachers are motivated by the fact that they can monitor what is happening on all of their students’ screens. Mme. Collet has been using this tool of late to log her 3rd graders in when they come to the lab, both on the computer and on DiLL. This is a screen shot of her students working on Keynote presentations. Click to expand.
Filed Under Tools
Yabla has turned out to be a pretty useful subscription. You can see a sample video here. I see French and Spanish teachers telling their students to turn off the subtitles in the target language so they can guage how good their comprehension is. The “word-click” feature is nice. Click on any word from the subtitle and see a definition on the right hand side. Yabla has a difficulty rating system built in, so it’s easy for teachers to find level-appropriate videos. Try out a few of the free videos and see what you think!
Filed Under Tools
Another one of the challenges in a department that relies on a lot of videos, physical objects, electronic peripherals like the Flip cameras, and books is how to keep track of it all, not lose it, and know where to go to find it fast. With a little help from my friends, we’ve got a pretty nifty solution to this using Google forms.
You can see the form I created here. What’s cool about it, is that we have a little JavaScript parsing the data from the Google spreadsheet that takes only the latest entry about any given item, so when we click on the “CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHO HAS WHAT” link, you see exactly who has what at their desk.
This makes it possible for teachers to hand off items to each other without going through some centralized librarian (me) and allows everybody to see, at a glance, where everything is. It’s also a way of holding people accountable for what they have checked out. And I can see a history of any item on the Google spreadsheet.
Of course, there are a few weaknesses.
As you can see, this form is currently public and there’s no identification or LDAP authentication like there is with our reservation calendar, so don’t go checking out things that aren’t yours ;-). I could password protect this page on Wikispaces if I needed to, but for now I’ll let it be.
The second slight issue is that teachers can’t reserve peripherals, videos, etc. in advance like they do with reserving space in the lab. For the most part, this won’t be an issue because we don’t think that far in advance here {forced smile}. I’ll be telling teachers that need equipment for any future projects to go ahead and check it out in advance with a note as to when they’ll actually be using it. That way a teacher who needs a Flip camera, say, for a class period, can simply go to the “possessor” and the possessor can check it out on to her colleague and then get it right back. Or so we hope.
The third problem is the human problem. This system still relies on teachers using it when they borrow stuff from the equipment closet or pass things on to their colleagues. And no, we don’t have gadgettrak yet for little things like keys, boxes, cables, and cameras. BUT WHEN WE DO, you can bet I’ll be standing in line.
Anyway, I’m formally introducing this system next Tuesday at our Faculty Development meeting. I’ll let you know in a few months how this goes. Also, we’ll be making a few tweaks-this is still in alpha- but once I have a final version I should be able to make the code available to other tech coordinators out there who are also juggling many small electronic thingy-boppers.
Filed Under Tools
If I had to point to one thing that is really making my job as a Lab Coordinator easier to manage it’s this open source reservation calendar. You can see ours here and a demo of the latest version here (we haven’t updated yet, but we will). As you can see from the release history, the Meeting Room Booking System (MRBS) has been in development since 2000, with major improvements dropping regularly since 2004.
It may not be as colorful as Google calendars, but it’s a central, standalone webapp where all twenty of us can make reservations for different areas of the lab, thereby maximizing our use of the space. LDAP authentication means that faculty can use the same login and password for this calendar as they do for their webmail and that one teacher can’t accidentally delete another teacher’s reservation (only I can edit other people’s entries as Admin).
The only downside is that reservations are rounded to the nearest half hour, fifteen minutes, or five minutes, whatever time interval you decide on. So if you wanted to make reservations to the nearest five minutes you’d end up with a ton of rows going down the screen (96 rows for an eight hour day to be exact). We compromised by setting fifteen minute intervals throughout the day and then asking teachers to type in the exact time of their reservation (their class period) in the reservation title. A reservation from yesterday, for example, appears to go from 12:00 - 1:00 PM but the teacher has clarified in the title that it’s really from 12:15 to 12:55 PM.
Later versions of the calendar allow you to set up periods, so if you have a set time schedule you can make it even easier on people, as this demo shows. Here at Lab that wouldn’t work, since the World Language Lab is used by students in the Lower School, Middle School, and High School, all of which have different daily schedules.
I suppose to appreciate this open source project, you’d have to understand the alternatives. One alternative would be a paper solution, which would be a waste of trees and a big pain since the teachers are all over the school all day and do not all have offices in a central location. The other alternative would be an email solution, which would cause me no end of problems trying to give the right faculty priority when two teachers wanted the same time slot. This way, faculty work out the time conflicts themselves and it’s always clear who is coming in when. Major administrative time savings.
Teachers use the third column, called the TRAINING AREA, to reserve time with me for professional training. As long as my schedule shows availability, they don’t have to ask, “are you free during such and such period?” They just make the appointment and come in. Simple.
The world turns on small hinges and I for one am very grateful to the developers who volunteered their time and talents to design a reservation calendar that just works. Thank you, John Beranek & Co.
Filed Under Tools, YuperStars
A big thanks to all of the HS students, teachers, and parents who submitted workshops for this year’s ArtsFest (to be held Thursday, February 26, 2009). We had a great response this year and there are some awesome workshops to choose from.
This year, registration for ArtsFest will be done entirely ONLINE. This will save paper and make it much easier for everyone to get what they want out of ArtsFest. Workshops are available on a first-come, first-served basis. High School students can register and change their registration (based on workshop availability) between now and Friday, December 19th. That’s just two weeks away, so don’t delay!
To sign up,
1. Go to http://ucls.uchicago.edu/artsfest/
2. Read descriptions of the workshops
3. Click on Continue and sign in with your LabNet ID and Password (the one you use to connect to files or access your email)
4. Select the courses you want (remember if you select a two-part workshop, you must sign up for both Part I and Part II).
5. Click submit
If HS Students do not have access to a personal computer, they are welcome to register in the World Language Lab (UH207). If HS Students do not know their LabNet ID or password, they can talk to Baker Franke in UH202.
HUGE KUDOS to the ArtsFest Committee, especially to co-chairs Emily Searles and Rachel Turner for their incredible work thus far. And another big THANK YOU to IS folks for making the online registration possible.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Tools
This is a fun little project I’ve done every Thanksgiving at my place. Now I’ve put it online. You can participate, even if you can’t be in Chicago on Sunday.
Go to http://gratitudeleaf.net and fill out the form. That’s all!
Click on the map to see where people have posted from.
p.s. ingredients were dabbledb, flickr cc, weebly, and godaddy; time in the oven about 2 hours
Filed Under Best Bytes, Photos, Tools
Here’s a handy chart for inserting accented characters into HTML-only text boxes on your blog or in PowerTeacher Gradebook. Look for the character you want in the first column and then copy the HTML Entity in the second column for use in your text box.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Tools, World Languages
Yesterday, we had the pleasure of viewing a presentation by a Rosetta Stone representative. He graciously gave the department several days to trial several different languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Portguese, Irish, Hebrew, Arabic) and then came yesterday to show us how the online Classroom version works. Here are some of our impressions:
**PROS**
1. Rosetta Stone provides instantaneous feedback about pronunciation and gives students an opportunity to practice over and over again until they get it right. We don’t know of another program that has the feature of analyzing whether your oral communication is actually communicative. This is something that a human being (teacher) can’t do in the classroom in real time. And it’s something that would be costly for families to do with a tutor.
2. The pictures are clear, colorful, and multicultural.
3. Version 3 has a good mix of activities (listening, reading, typing, speaking) that would keep students engaged.
4. No English is used to explain language. It’s instant immersion and theoretically the brain will begin to “think” in the target language, if all you are seeing are visual prompts.
5. Having a Rosetta Stone site license would allow students to branch out into other languages that they are interested in (e.g. Italian), practice their pronunciation for music classes (e.g. French), or simply brush up on languages that they are no longer studying at school.
6. Rosetta Stone is very good for the independent language learner who is less comfortable venturing a guess out loud in the classroom and would prefer to make mistakes and get it right in front of a computer first.
7. The Rosetta Stone manager would allow teachers to create custom lesson paths using pre-existing language activities, tailored to fit the needs of individual students or groups of students within a classroom. There is also an easy way to see how much time students are spending with the software.
**CONS**
1. Teachers cannot upload their own images and sound prompts to create lessons that are more precisely focused on existing vocabulary lists used in our curriculum. This may be a feature in the future (we hope so!), because it would give teachers ultimate control. Even better, I’d like to see *students* creating their own vocabulary sets (like we do in iFlash) and then reviewing them, Rosetta Stone-style, until they have them down pat. There are lists of course content for each of the different languages that can aid teachers in determining how applicable the content might be to their classes.
2. Rosetta Stone does not approach the AP level. It ends with about 3rd year language skills in high school. It would be great if it had more advanced levels, but the company’s first goal is to get all 30 languages upgraded to Version 3 by middle of 2009.
3. Rosetta Stone Version 3 can be repetitive and boring. There is no easy way to jump ahead without knowing exactly what kind of new content you could be missing. The “Adaptive Recall” feature, which is supposed to remember which exercises you had trouble with and bring them back periodically, might be good in theory, but I think most language learners are going to want to see new content at a faster rate rather than constantly reviewing old content.
4. Rosetta Stone does not allow for student interaction either in the classroom or with other classrooms.
5. The speech recognition may not cover enough of a range of variation in pronunciation. Sometimes it does not recognize “correct” pronunciation as correct, and while an adult learner might just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next activity, that could be really frustrating to a student who wants to get it right.
6. There is no direct explanation or even review of grammar points. Students would need to get that support elsewhere, from sites like BBC Languages or teacher websites.
7. The Chinese program sometimes uses pinyin in the place of the original Chinese characters. They should always be used together.
8. The price tag. Rosetta Stone prices their licenses based on total student population, not on actual users. For our school (1700 students or so), the cost per year would be $20,000. This works out to about $10 - 25/student. Not all students would use the software, so all parents would be paying an extra $25 / year for the privilege. The good news is that accounts not being used by students can be used by other members of the Lab Schools community, which would give family members, faculty, and staff a chance to dabble in many different languages on their own time.
To summarize, while the Rosetta Stone approach does have its limitations, we think that having this resource at our disposal would most certainly increase students’ exposure to different languages, would give teachers another way of differentiating instruction, and would mark the Lab Schools as a community that is committed to connecting and communicating with a multilingual, multicultural world. I think the opportunity for students to learn languages on their own would be a terrific preparation for college-level language classes. And it would be a valuable support to students who prefer to learn by themselves and at their own pace.
We’d be most interested to hear from the opinions of our parents about this software. Feel free to leave your comments below.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Tools
When the lab was built 2 years ago, we started with a Califone International headset like this. The 3066AV model had 3.5mm in/out plugs, which went through an Edirol USB Audio interface to give us real-time audio feedback in the headset and plug into the USB slots on our iMacs. The 3066USB model might also have worked for us, but there would have been no way of getting that immediate aural feedback in the ears, which some teachers feel is very effective for improving pronunciation (and I agree).
We found that after one year of light use, the Califone microphones and/or headphones would produce a crackling sound and in general, felt clunky, uncomfortable, and unreliable. Besides the popping in and out of sound feedback in the headset, our biggest problem was controlling output volume. Students could change the volume in three places (System Preferences, DiLL software, and using the knob on the side of the headsets themselves) and at the time DiLL didn’t have away of adjusting for volume setting changes between use (now it automatically resets audio output to a default middle-of-the-road setting every time the program is launched). So we “temporarily” replaced all 24 seats in the Instructional Area with a Plantronics DSP-500 model that we had on hand.
Of course, the big disadvantage once again was that students couldn’t hear vocal output in their ears, so we installed a small app called LineIn (see post below) to give them the option of hearing their voice as they spoke by clicking the “PASS THRU” button. Unfortunately, since this is a software program that processes the signal through the computer’s CPU, there is a slight delay between speaking and hearing, which can be really annoying after awhile (I think most students leave it off).
I tried another set of Logitech USB headphones in the Training Area, where teachers come to record in GarageBand, but the latency is just as bad or worse than the Plantronics. They are a lot nicer looking than the Califones, though. I like how the microphones are enclosed with hard plastic, versus the foam-covered mic screens on the Plantronics, which have mostly been pulled off and lost by now. As far as sound quality goes, pick your problem: either you sound like you’re in a box (Califone), the s’s and p’s are too hot (Plantronics), or the treble is too high (Logitech). You can listen to a sample recording of all three headsets for a comparison.
The creators of DiLL up at Northwestern are leaning toward the following combos of headset and hardware, which will solve the aural feedback latency problem. Now we just need to decide which combo will work best for us.
Combo A
USB AUDIO ADAPTERS
SYBA SD-CM-UAUD ($8, lowest noise of all CM108s we’ve tested)
>> buy here
or
StarTech ICUSBAUDIO ($11, noise on par with other CM108 chipsets)
>> buy here
&
HEADSETS
Telex Discovery DS-8v (~$55, bulky, but study and has replaceable cable)
>> buy here
or
Sennheiser PC 350 (~$110 - $180, very high quality, cable not replaceable)
>> buy here
Combo B
Sanako SLH-07 headset ($102, headset-only, mic has no bass)
>> buy here
Replaceable USB cable ($26, cable is integrated with adapter)
>> buy here
All three headsets have stiff mic booms, which avoids the common problem of students rotating the arm upside-down or not pulling it toward their mouth. Any variation of Combo A will have superior sound to the Sanako in Combo B, but Combo B has virtually nothing that can go wrong setup-wise.
I’d be *very* curious what other Mac-only language labs are using for their headsets. I guess right now, I’m leaning toward Combo B. We’ll be making a purchase sometime next spring, so there’s still time to change my mind…
Filed Under Best Bytes, Tools
Rogue Amoeba makes two pieces of software that we find helpful on client machines: SoundSource and LineIn.
LineIn allows students using normal USB headphones to hear their own voices looped back through their headsets in real time. There is a slight delay, but for labs that aren’t able to get headphones with built-in loop back and zero latency, this is a good alternative.
SoundSource allows teachers and users to see immediately which devices are being used for audio input and output. This is especially helpful in our Project Area, where we have numerous peripherals. It also helps in the Instructional Area. When the sound isn’t working properly, teachers can see with one click on the menu bar if the inputs and outputs are correct, without having to open up System Preferences.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Tools
Firefly* is a great app for serving up iTunes media on a local subnet. Firefly allows all of the client machines in the World Language Lab to access audio content that is centrally stored and organized on our server via the iTunes interface. It even streams some video content (i.e. video podcasts) though that service has been less reliable than the audio streaming. An open source project, you can download a copy here and try it out for yourself. Instructions for Mac configuration are located on the Firefly wiki.
Here is a shot of the config panel in System Preferences:
Here is a shot of what iTunes looks like on client computers:
* Not to be confused with the other Firefly of Serenity fame.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Tools
Here at the lab, we use a handy piece of software called MyTunes RSS to stream the content of our iTunes library. This allows teachers to create RSS feeds of playlists, iTunes-readable playlists, and streaming links to individual tracks. Here’s a peak into the web interface. The latest version also allows teachers to browse the tracks in the catalog from any web-accessible computer with a built-in Flash music player.
The full license for Version 3 is only $21.
Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Tools, YuperStars
Frau Zemil has been in the lab at least three times so far this year to learn and implement a great piece of software called Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). ARD allows teachers to see the screens of all of the students in the Instructional Area. This is especially useful when you are giving instructions to students, because you can actually see if everyone is following along okay with your directives.
Frau Zemil has used the tool to open up web pages on the students’ desktops, send Word documents with instructions for the day, and most importantly, to log third and fourth graders into DiLL (since they don’t have their own LabNet IDs). We are finding this tool to be a great time saver, since we can have the lab set up and ready to go *before* fourth graders enter the lab. All they have to do is sit down and everything that they need for the day’s lesson is opened up and ready to go.
Kudos to Frau Zemil, Mme Collet, Mme Romanelli, Mme Jackson, and others in the department for learning this great tool.
Here is the Remote Desktop Cheat Sheet I’ve been using to train.
Filed Under Best Bytes, Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, Tools, World Languages
At this year’s TechWeek, 10 new faculty signed up for a UCLS WordPress blog. Blogging is new to most of the faculty in this department, so we’ll see how often they end up using them to post homework assignments. Blogs can be a great tool for one- and two-way communication in the language classroom. This is a good start.
World Language Department Blogs
Grace Romanelli - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/bloger
Deb Foote - Spanish
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/pieblog
Suzanne Baum - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/sbaumfr
Suzanne Baum - Spanish
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/sbaum
Jon Sun - Chinese
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/greenpanda
Steve Farver - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/sfarver
Catherine Collet - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/colletblog
Diane Jackson - French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/djackso
Xing-lu Liang - Chinese
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/chineseclass
Ann Beck - Spanish & French
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/beckblog
Laura Salas-Damer - Spanish
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/estoy
Craig Reubelt
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/ser
Mythili Venkataraman
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/bb
Angelica Guerrero
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/smg
Annette Steinbarth
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/midsv
Marianne Zemil
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/apgerman
French Trip
http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/frenchtrip
Filed Under Best Bytes, Tools
We begin this year with a discovery that neither PowerPoint nor Apple’s Keynote play nice with QuickTime 7.5 This, after all my ranting and raving about how cool it was going to be to create podcasts using Keynote slides this fall. I’m pretty sure other EdTech people are going to run into the same issue, so I’ll post here and then link to it where I can.
After two hours of trial and error and reading every post I could find on the topic, I arrived at the magic combination. No, you can’t do just one or two of these items to get this fixed; you must do them all! Hopefully this will help other iMac users out there running Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard).
Step 1. REMOVE “com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist” from User/Library/Preferences. If you have never opened Keynote before, open it and then delete the first preference file it creates.
Step 2. DOWNLOAD Pacifist at this link, install, and drag to your Applications Folder.
Step 3. DOWNLOAD QuickTime 7.4.5 (yes, you’re going to have to downgrade until Apple comes up with some kind of a patch). When the Installer opens, quit it and drag the .pkg over the Pacifist Application.
Step 4. Click on the lock on the top right corner of Pacifist and Authenticate. Click on the top row of the QuickTime package summary to select it and then click the “Install” button on the top left corner.
Step 5. Twice, Pacifist will ask you if you want to Replace certain items. Select the check box for all future items and click the “Replace” button.
Step 6. LOG OUT and log back in. Open a Keynote file and you should now be able to export video and audio to QT without any problems.
I’m a big Apple champion, but stuff like this, wow. Tries my patience.
p.s. Oh, and another discovery: iMovie ‘08 will *only* work with QT 7.5, according to an error I get on some of the lab machines. Others seem to be working fine with 7.4.5.. so we’ll just have to see…
Filed Under Best Bytes, French, German, Spanish, Tools, World Languages
The department has just subscribed to a fantastic little service from Essex, England for language learners in the Lower School. Contact your language teacher or visit the Lab for information about the user name and password. This service can be used at home as well as school. We hope our learners will take full advantage of these services!
http://linguascope.com (Languages for All)
http://linguaprime.com (Languages for Early Learners)
http://linguastars.com (Languages for GCSE Students in the UK - Intermediate Learners)
Filed Under Questions, Tools
The fourth principle, that Good Practice Gives Prompt Feedback, is a challenge in even the smallest of language classrooms because one teacher is speaking to many students with vastly different target language skills. And it’s even harder for every student to be able to speak back to the teacher and receive regular, personalized feedback. Technologies like DiLL (Digital Language Lab) can help buffer this situation by allowing students to process aural input at their pace and then respond when they are ready. One of the most common classroom activities teachers used on DiLL is called a Lesson Task. This is where a teacher selects or creates a listening comprehension activity to which students can respond at their own pace.
Here is an example of what the student hears + my response (if these clips are truncating in Firefox, try Safari):
Teacher Prompts + Student Response
Here are five student responses to the same questions (what the teacher hears when reviewing student responses online):
Five Student Responses
And here are two quick examples of Angelica Guerrero’s fifth graders presenting on Hispanos Famosos. In this situation, there was no audio prompt. Students were asked to simply present to the computer as if they were presenting to the class. This is a wonderful way to give each student a chance to practice speaking out loud without making the class sit through an entire hour of just listening to each other’s work. The teacher can review the student recordings on her own time and give feedback privately to each student. She can also distribute the recordings back to the students so they can hear their own voices and recognize their own mistakes.
Presentation 1
Presentation 2
Age-appropriate and language-level appropriate conversation is key to language acquisition and we are fortunate to have a tool like DiLL, which can facilitate an experience approximating the immersion experience without the pressure to immediately respond. Other tools that we haven’t really tested yet include chat rooms, classroom blogging and/or chatting, communicating from classroom to classroom or country to country using Skype, and “typing-only” classes, where information is relayed via communication technologies only.
As for other real-life language simulation, I’ve been keeping my eye on the development of safe, educational, online spaces in something like Second Life, where students could potentially converse with native speakers of their target language who are their own age, or play virtual scavenger hunts that require the use of their current language skills. Even if a student isn’t completely enamored with language per se, I can see a big advantage to using language in the context of virtual realities. The target language might suddenly become relevant to increasing numbers of students if it becomes a real tool that they can use to communicate, explore, and make stuff.
