Real Time Community Building with Microsoft Sway in Bella Ginzbursky-Blum’s Russian courses

In a Nutshell

Faculty members who want to develop a sense of community among their students look more and more to the affordances of technology to help them. While there are many tools out there to help foster a sense of community and collaboration in your course, there are very few that allow for real time, in-class community building. Bella Ginzbursky-Blum has tried many tools over the years to varying degrees of success. Technology for real-time collaboration in the classroom has historically been less than ideal. With the advent of real-time collaborative tools like Google Docs, the ability to collaborate in the classroom without the technology getting in the way is now becoming more of a reality. Bella has brought one such tool, Microsoft Sway, into her classroom in an innovative way that has had a transformative effect on the way she teaches her Russian Literature class.

Course Description

In this course, students read Russian literary texts in the original Russian. Class time is used largely to discuss the texts, concepts, and unfamiliar terms and grammatical constructions. Getting students to talk in a class, especially in a foreign language, can sometimes be a challenge, so developing community and making communication fun and engaging is essential to the course dynamic and the students’ education.

Course and Assignment Objectives

  1. Bella uses Microsoft Sway in many of her class sessions as a way to get students talking and sharing ideas, but also as a learning tool.
  2. While these in-class activities are not graded other than as class participation, they serve as important elements in the class dynamic and learning environment as a whole.

Assignments

There are several ways Bella uses Sway in her in-class activities:

    1. As a way to discuss cultural context: unfamiliar terms and contexts can often lead to misunderstanding when encountering other cultures and eras. Bella identifies several of the terms and concepts from the readings and asks students to find images that represent those terms and concepts. These images are entered into Sway in real time during class and automatically populate in Sway’s grid, which is projected at the front of the class. Once all the students have had an opportunity to add their images to the presentation, the class discusses the possible accuracy of each image within the context of the story. Watch this short video to learn more about the assignment.
    2. As a way to share and discuss plot concepts: Understanding the plot of a foreign language novel or short story can be a challenge in itself. Sway is a good way to get students to practice their writing and comprehension skills as they work in small groups to summarize aspects of these stories, and Sway simultaneously makes those summaries available in real time for the entire class to read and discuss.

Lessons Learned

Things that worked well:

  1. Since all students have a free Microsoft Office 365 account, they have unlimited access to Sway as well. The application is cross platform and web based, so there’s nothing to install and no compatibility issues.
  2. Students really enjoy working together on in-class exercises and then visualizing their work immediately projected for class conversation.
  3. Exercises are very quick to do, allowing the technology to reside in the background.
  4. Students are more comfortable discussing their ideas in smaller groups before sharing with the whole class. Class discussions are more engaging.

Things to think about improving for next time:

  1. Most of the negative issues with using Sway for these in-class assignments have to do with the problem of training the students how to add content to the presentation so that it works correctly when displayed for the class. These issues are usually not major, but some familiarity with the software before they use it in class will improve the experience.

Major Takeaway:

Most of the negative issues with using Sway for these in-class assignments have to do with the problem of training the students how to add content to the presentation so that it works correctly when displayed for the class. These issues are usually not major, but some familiarity with the software before they use it in class will improve the experience.

Try it Yourself / Tools Used

Learn

Microsoft offers Sway tutorials on Youtube. Watch their Youtube playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcg6DGO9hpI&list=PLXPr7gfUMmKyE22-YpbgcDfr2SXEO7-qX&index=1

Create

  • Sway is available for all William & Mary community members here: http://sway.com. Just log in with your William & Mary username and password.

Shared Resources

Below are resources developed by Dr. Ginzbursky-Blum for her course. If these are useful to you, she would be glad to hear how you’re using them or incorporating them into your own teaching.

About Bella Ginzbursky-Blum

Bella Ginzbursky-Blum has been with the college since 1992. She teaches all levels of Russian language, as well as courses on Russian culture and literature. She is the Russian House advisor and also advises on the student run Russian language newsletter, Gazeta, which is published several times a year.

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