Teaching with Technology

During my time an educator in Spanish and linguistics, and now as an Instructional Technology Specialist, I have given considerable thought to how modern tools for teaching and linguistic analysis can be put into the hands of students in an engaging, interactive way. The following set of links contain sample presentations from SPAN 215: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics, which incorporate novel teaching and research methods for students. 

For example, to increase student engagement, I built my class PowerPoints into TopHat, a dynamic platform for presenting and authoring course materials and assessments. During a lesson on vowel classification, students were asked to identify Spanish vowels by their specific characteristics, and responded by tapping/clicking on responses, creating a heat map of responses. This activity is exemplified in slides 7-12. 

Beyond presentations, I firmly believe that students should have significant control over their learning. In another iteration of SPAN 215, students recorded themselves saying words in English and Spanish, then, in a program called Praat (used by linguists to analyze speech sounds), they measured the length of certain sounds, and fed those data points into a shared Google Sheet, creating their own chart based on their own data. Click on each link for more information, and on the Reflections link for more on my views about technology in the classroom.