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.
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.
There are several ways Bella uses Sway in her in-class activities:
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.
Microsoft offers Sway tutorials on Youtube. Watch their Youtube playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcg6DGO9hpI&list=PLXPr7gfUMmKyE22-YpbgcDfr2SXEO7-qX&index=1
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.
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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