Language+Practice+Days

Language Practice Days

Every week, we have four days to hold a virtual Language Lab with our students. Students will now get four days of language instruction per week, instead of two or three. The idea is that students will attend class on their regular days, and on the off days, they will attend the language lab. This applies to all first and second year language students, as well as other students where we feel they would benefit from extra practice. The Practice Lab will be constructed in such a way that students will do work on their own, have it checked on-line by the computer, and then have an exercise which they can place in a portfolio for later review by their language instructor.

There are three platforms we could use for this process.

Google Sites This is the least sexy of the options, but the easiest for us to populate with content. We could organize it any way we wanted, and most of the material we currently use for our classes could very simply be added to this site.

Pathbrite This is the most complicated and interesting of the platforms, and it actually collects student work and puts it together for you. Much of the material in this platform would have to be created by us, but we could make a learning portfolio for a student for their whole time here. There would be a steep learning curve, but once we understood how to create things, it would be very interactive for the students. There is a whole YouTube channel devoted to learning how to do things on Pathbrite.

Educanvas This is a platform which creates[| a series of canvasses] which act as units, and can be video, audio, text, or links to other sites. It's very flexible, and has pretty strong support.