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Willamette University Spanish
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Bertin Ortega Web Based Study Aids Date Awarded: December 1998 Other Participants: URL: Project Goals and Objectives: We wanted to provide the
Spanish Department with a tool to enhance language learning at the beginning
and the intermediate level. The project resulted too ambitious and we
ended up reducing it to cover only the beginning level of language instruction.
Even with that reduction we ended up with about 150 sets of exercises
and probably more than 400 hundred html documents (very often one exercise
needed four html documents). Process: Originally there was only
one student involved, Jenne Taylor. During the last stage of the project
Ethan Knight also did some work. We had a couple of planning meetings
in which we explained Jenne our project; we showed her some examples
of the types of exercises we were going to make. During this early meetings
we also showed her the software we were going to use (Hot Potatoes),
and gave her an introductory lesson to it. Then we had regular biweekly
meetings to present and compare advances of the work, and we decide
on what needed to be done for the next meeting. The project took one
full semester. Staffing needs. Perhaps some help in creating the front
page for the exercises would have been a good thing to have. Outcomes: The materials we created
have been posted for four semesters now. These are useful instructional
aids. These are exercises used primary by students in the first year
Spanish language program at Willamette, Spanish 131 and 132. These materials
have been used mostly as optional exercises to complement and enhance
practice done in the classroom and in the language lab. Although the
materials have been used primary by Willamette students, we think that
these materials have found a wider audience. We think so because we
found a teacher's web page with a list of useful links that include
our exercises and the comment: "Great practice!" The web page
in question can be found at: http://www.quia.com/pages/srarod2.html Critical Evaluation: The regular meetings and the commitment of the people involved were invaluable for the completion of this project. The software worked as was expected. As in any other program there are things that you wish you could change. In our case, the most important aspect we would have changed, if we could, would be to include the ability for the instructor to receive a report on the use of the materials, who, when, score. We are glad to say that the newest version of the program includes this capability, through the use of e-mail and cgi scripts. We will contact Willamette Integrated Technology Services (WITS) to request that these cgi scripts be installed so that we can test and add these report capabilities to our exercises. This was our best experience working with any type of electronic exercises. We learned and we are still learning about its possibilities. By talking with students that have used these exercises we are also learning what works and what does not. Based on those experiences and in the need for same type of materials for second year Spanish language courses here at Willamette, we created a second project. This new project involves going back to the original exercises and changing some of them, creating new exercises to cover certain weak areas in the original project, and creating new materials to be used in second year Spanish language classes. |
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