Profiles in Practice

Judy Raggi Moore: Italian Virtual Class

The basic premise of the IVC Chiavi di lettura (Italian Virtual Class Keys to Interpretation) method is to create an Italian community so that Emory students may learn the language in an authentic, natural manner. An online multi-media text and a written text support guide students through the 20 regions of Italy and includes authentic interviews with native speakers in natural settings. Art, art history, history, music, folklore, traditions, and a wide range of other topics featured in the curriculum are specific to periods and regions and support the book’s continuous cultural track. Because the emphasis is on cultural acquisition rather than on grammar, students do not study grammar outside of its cultural context; thus, the cultural element and the grammar remain connected and are learned as a unit. Professor Ristaino conducted a research study in 2005-2006 on the effectiveness of their method, comparing test scores from students of Italian at Emory and at another large southeastern university. Her research data demonstrated significantly higher posttest listening and grammar scores for the Emory students using IVC Chiavi di lettura than for students using more traditional methods and texts to study Italian.

The Italian Department at Emory University
http://italian.emory.edu

ECIT's Technology, Literature, and Curriculum (TLC)

ECIT recently hosted the "Technology, Literature, and Curriculum" (TLC ) workshop for a group of English graduate students that provided intensive training in teaching technologies, including Blackboard, web development, digital images, digital audio and video, blogs, wikis and podcasting.

The month-long workshop met twice a week in two-hour sessions. The primary focus of the workshop was on how to effectively incorporate these instructional technologies into the classroom. TLC was a huge success: the workshop combined a unique blend of hands-on instruction in teaching technologies with discussions about practical and theoretical models for using technology in the pedagogy of both literature and composition.

"TLC helped me refine my ideas for incorporating wikis in my future courses. I got feedback on my ideas concerning what is and is not possible, as well as feedback from peers on what they thought would work. I've got the tools now, as well, to build an interactive syllabus and a more vibrant Blackboard environment."

--Brian Croxall
English PhD Student, TLC participant

Hillary Rodman: Giving Students an "Out-of-Lab" Experience

Hillary Rodman, faculty in Emory’s Psychology Department utilizes a blend of instructional technologies to create a pre-lab exercise for her students.

Historically, during the first lab of the semester, students greeted Dr. Rodman with multiple questions regarding the set-up and the introductory steps of the lab’s dissection. She decided to create an online laboratory guide to help facilitate those lab procedures.

On a web page within her Blackboard course, Dr. Rodman provides an overview of the lab with preparatory steps to address her student’s pre-class questions. In addition to providing written instructions about the lab activities, the web page also includes images and a brief video of the first steps of the dissection itself (shot, narrated, and edited by Rodman). This multi-media lab manual provides the students with a pre-class explanation of most of the in-lab questions.

According to Rodman, "Before I added the pre-lab online exercise, the amount of student questions about the workings of the lab stretched a one-class period activity over into a second class meeting." After posting her web materials on the lab, Professor Rodman commented that the type of questions changed from "How do I do this?" to "Why is this?". By reviewing the pre-lab exercise before the lab, Rodman’s students were able to focus their efforts on learning about the lab rather than learning how to do the lab.

Li Hong: Summer in China

Since 2004, Professor Hong has made blogging available to Emory students on summer study abroad in China, so that they could post images and comments about their travel experience. In summer of 2006, she was accompanied by Johnny Waggener from the Language Center. Together they worked to develop one of Emory’s first podcasts, making supplemental lecture materials available to students during their summer coursework at the Beijing Normal University. Professor Hong and Mr. Waggener also filmed many cultural events, later digitized and added to the Summer in China podcast.

http://cet.emory.edu/eclc/summerinchina/podcast/podcast.xml

Emory's Summmer in China Website
http://languagecenter.emory.edu/summerinchina/

Carol Herron: Assessing Language Pedagogy

Traditional foreign language instruction tends to be deductive, beginning with explanations of grammar rules moving to the practice of the rules in application exercises. An inherent problem associated with deductive instruction is that language learners do not always perceive the importance of why they are learning a particular grammar rule other than it is in curriculum materials. An alternative to this traditional approach is inductive instruction whereby language learners are presented with a linguistic pattern that they observe and use in an authentic cultural setting before they attempt to interpret how it works. Professor Herron has developed and assessed an inquiry-based, guided inductive model. Students are presented with multiple examples of a particular linguistic pattern (e.g. how to express negation) that they use in a communicative activity (e.g., what not to do when invited to a French home). Upon completion of the contextualized activity, the teacher then poses leading questions designed to guide students to formulate their own conclusions on how the pattern works and its functional importance in communication. In our French classes, she has conducted classroom research that examines the effects of guided inductive instruction on student grammar performance. In several studies with first and second semester French students, Professor Herron found that the guided inductive approach significantly enhances grammar performance more than traditional deductive instruction. Professor Herron’s inductive foreign language method will be the foundation of a new multimedia software she is developing (titled "Oh La La, c’est Fun le Français!") together with French graduate students and the Emory College Language Center technology staff.

Vialla Hartfield-Mendez: Service Learning

Professor Vialla Hartfield-Méndez created a new service learning course, Spanish 317, "Writing, Context, and Community," built around student volunteer work in three programs of service to the Hispanic population. This initiative has expanded to include a component of service learning in Spanish 212, "The Hispanic World: Culture, Society, Language." Largely through her efforts, and in collaboration with the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese has received grants from the university’s Joint Activities Committee and the Center for Teaching and Curriculum to sponsor related events at the museum and at area schools with large Hispanic populations. In support of these initiatives, Professor Hartfield-Méndez has also received grants from the Office of University-Community Partnerships (OUCP), the Theory Practice Learning Program (TPL), the Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS), and Emory College Online (ECO). Professor Hartfield-Méndez has been named Community Partnership Faculty Fellow for 2003-2004 by the OUCP and received the Community Outreach Faculty Award from ICIS. She was also honored in April 2006 with the Emory College Language Center’s "Language Teacher of the Year" award.

http://www.news.emory.edu/Releases/spanish1048870409.html

Ben Freed: Creating a Virtual Museum

Ever want to create your own museum that showcases your collection of teaching materials? Dr. Ben Freed (Anthropology Department, Emory University) did just that. Dr. Freed filled his virtual museum with images, documents and web links all to be used for his class in methods of biological anthropology.

Freed created this virtual museum using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and Fireworks to create and manipulate imagers and web pages. The virtual museum allows students to "walk" in the various halls and look at and click through images of many different ancient skulls and other artifacts.

Dr. Freed was fairly comfortable with technology in the classroom, but the task of building a virtual museum represented another level of knowledge. Freed attended a summer faculty seminar hosted by CET that gave him the time and access to expert assistance he needed to build his museum.

According to Freed, "the museum allows students to see, up close, these rare resources." The layout of the virtual museum also reinforces the learning objectives of the course. "Using a museum metaphor will hopefully make the students more comfortable exploring non-virtual museums," Freed said.

Freed’s virtual museum is also being used by colleagues in other disciplines as well. Because the museum lives on the web, Freed can share his museum with others simply by sharing the web link.

Dorothy Fletcher: Art History’s Interactive Syllabus

Creating an interactive syllabus for your course presents the course materials in a unique manner. Dorothy Fletcher, Sr. Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art History, uses an interactive syllabus in her Art History courses. By creating links to her course assignments, images and reading materials on her syllabus web page, Professor Fletcher provides her students one "click" access to all the course content for a particular day.

In her course on Emory’s Blackboard system, Professor Fletcher has all her content organized in multiple ways for her students. In addition to the course materials being linked to the syllabus by date, Professor Fletcher groups the content by types as well. Students can simply go to the "Early Greek" file, for example, to review all the images of from that era. The students can prepare for an exam on a given subject while at the same time seeing all the materials for the next week’s class. By giving her students multiple pathways to access the course materials, Professor Fletcher supports varied learning styles among her students.

Professor Fletcher’s approach to organizing the content for her Art History course is replicated by the all the Teaching Assistants responsible for nearly a dozen other sections of the course.

Nancy Bliwise: Creating Content to Strengthen Core Concepts

For most students, the basic concepts of statistics can be challenging to grasp. Nancy Bliwise, faculty in Emory’s Psychology Department, created a series of interactive, flash-based learning tutorials for her students to better understand key statistical concepts. The tutorials cover topics such as sampling, the central limit theorem, tests of means and scatter plots. All of Professor Bliwise’s tutorials are accessible though a link in her Blackboard course. Students progress through the tutorials is tracked, however, all students can revisit any of the topics as many times as they like. Professor Bliwise commented on the tutorials, "Having the tutorials online and in an interactive format allows students who might not be willing to ask the proverbial 'dumb' question to review a key concept until they feel comfortable with the information."

Using Flash to animate the tutorials and make them interactive better illustrates the concepts to the students. Professor Bliwise began creating the first animated tutorials during an instructional technology summer seminar for faculty in 2001. During the summer seminar, Professor Bliwise partnered with a graduate student to learn about making Flash work for them and proceeded to complete the first few tutorials. Currently, Professor Bliwise has finished nearly a dozen different tutorials, all of which are being used by students throughout the Psychology Department.

Professor Bliwise’s elementary statistics tutorials are available online through the Emory’s Psychology Department website.