German Chris Overstreet, a German instructor, and Perihan Savas, a Teaching and Technology Fellow, are working together to incorporate and use technology in Chris’ three German classes. Students are learning German through online materials in WebCT in addition to traditional face-to-face instruction. Students are presented with a variety of technological teaching tools. As a part of the PT3 project, Chris and Perihan, recorded student dialogues in German and made movies of the dialogues that were put in the WebCT server for students’ viewing purposes. In addition, Netscape Composer was introduced for students to display their biographies and projects in German in their homepages on the Internet. Chris and Perihan are also promoting the use of the online bulletin board in WebCT to encourage students to practice German grammar in more creative and collaborative ways and transfer their experience to increase speaking skills. In addition, students are continually being surveyed in their learning preferences as well as their attitudes toward technology-assisted learning. The results of these surveys are also being used to select and experiment with new technological tools. Samples of students’ homepages can be seen at http://plaza.ufl.edu/mcphil/, http://www.geocities.com/germanbryon/, and http://plaza.ufl.edu/bucholz/index.htm. Mrs. Overstreet and Perihan also carried out a study on the effectiveness of the Online Bulletin Board as an instructional tool and presented their findings in Sunshine TESOL Conference in May, 2002. They are also working on a research paper, which is called "Online Bulletin Board in the foreign language classroom: What do students think?". On the second year of the grant, Dr. Franz Futterknecht, who is a professor of German in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida, joined the PT3 team. Dr. Futterknecht is also making use of digital video to give students more support on improving their speaking skills. In addition to teaching learners at different levels of German through WebCt, Dr. Futterknecht is also working on designing different courses supported by a variety of resources on the Internet. Some examples of the web pages that he uses to provide his students with more language practice and target language culture are: The city of Mannheim: German Universities: Shopping: Dr. Futterknecht is offering a listening course in German in which most of the materials presented are online, including different German media links to provide students with authentic language input. He is also making use of the language lab to help students to improve their pronunciation and listening skills. Dr. Futterknect and Perihan have been working on ways to introduce Premiere as a video editing tool to students who have a video project assignment to carry out during their field trip to Germany in Summer. 2003. Students will be asked to make a documentary of their trip that will last for three months and they will present their projects on their arrival in the USA. One of the main objectives for the German PT3 team so far has been to integrate technology into the foreign language classroom in a variety of ways and formats to promote meaningful and authentic language and culture learning. Another objective has been to provide students with good examples of effective use of technology for teaching and learning. In addition to trying out different technological tools for instruction, German PT3 team is planning to involve students more in the selection and application of technological tools available so that students are more conscious about the benefits of making use of technology in their learning and they can make use of their experience in all areas of study and become more independent learners. See pictures of the German team in action and sample movies of students practicing their German. Discover German is an online sequence of beginning and intermediate level courses at the University of Florida. Our goal is to teach the German language from the beginning in the context of culture through the use of new technologies. During the third year of the grant, the main goal of the German Team (Chris Overstreet, Franz Futterknecht, Perihan Savas) has been to use technologies to provide our students with more opportunities for interactivity, listening comprehension, as well as for writing and speaking in the target language. In the past, we used the Online Bulletin Board primarily as a springboard for conversation. Students responded to the instructor's posting form their home computers and thus came prepared to speak on a specific topic. However, since Discover German is taught in the Computer Lab, each student has access to a computer during class. Students can work in pairs to explore a cultural site and post their findings on the Bulletin Board. For example, students will visit a German school online and research what kind of exchange programs and projects this particular school has with other European countries. Then, they will post on the Bulletin Board what they could participate in if they were a student at that school. This activity combines learning about the European Educational System and practice of the Subjunctive Mood. This offers students the opportunity to interact with one another in a meaningful way use the target language in writing and speaking. In addition, the instructor can give individual feedback to the postings. Thus, students can learn from the authentic online materials, from each other, and the instructor. We also made use of the Divace software in the Tandberg Language Lab to provide students with more speaking-listening materials and activities. Besides the Discover German materials, we give students access to selections from Deutsche Welle, a German radio program. Students listen and answer question about a variety of topics. In addition, they engage in role-playing and record their dialogues. Students can listen to their recordings and improve both listening comprehension skills and pronunciation. All materials and audio recordings are kept in a class folder and accessible outside of class. We are in the process of introducing technologies that would allow the instructor to create sound files that the language learner can access and respond to from her/his home computer. Once this is in place, our students can work more independently on improving their listening and speaking skills. As a final project in Discover German, groups of students on the Intermediate level choose a topic for research, such as the European Union, the European Educational System, or the Environment. Last semester, a group produced a News program on the environment and following snapshots are taken from the movies that the students produced. In short, our experience in PT3 Grant has shown that use of educational technology based on effective pedagogy can make Foreign Language Learning more dynamic and productive for both instructors and students.
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