Hi, hola, ciao, salut language teachers and learners

This website showcases the capstone projects completed by a group of exceptional and resourceful graduate students for WLLC:5000 Teaching and Learning Languages (Fall 2020) at Iowa. Those virtual projects cover many topics, all related to language teaching. These artifacts were created using various tools, with only one constraint, they had to be digital.

A little bit of history. When I first started teaching this course (Fall 2019), due to the practical nature of it, I decided that I did not want the capstone project to be a traditional academic paper; instead, I asked my students to create a poster. Those posters, created by another fantastic group of graduate students, were showcased in a mini-conference (#TheThingsWeDoInClass), held in our Language Media Center; see flyer below. Some of them kept working on their posters and presented their works at various academic conferences.

This year, an in-person presentation would not have worked, hence the digital format. While planning this project, I was a little bit hesitant to ask my students to create such a complicated thing while balancing teaching for the first time in their life (for many of them) and being a graduate student. I should not have been. The ending results are impressive. This group of students managed the creation of a variety of projects that helped them further develop some of the pedagogical skills taught in this course while at the same time further developing new digital skills that will accompany them throughout their careers.

Those projects are meant to be used in a language classroom or by language learners. The Spanish GE Program is going to use three of them starting next semester. Re-writing for teaching: Short stories for Intermediate Spanish II by Lupita Zavaleta Vega, as the name said will be used in Intermediate Spanish II. Each story will be assigned at the beginning of each unit and will allow our students to further expand their intercultural competences in Spanish while enjoying a curated collection of authentic short stories. Additionally, the poster and the handout created by Leticia Fernández-Fontecha will be included in every ICON site for the whole sequence. This poster will help our students navigate and learn how to use gender-inclusive language in Spanish. Last but not least, during our semester orientation, we will use Madi Beauchamp's Padlet board and Gloria Jones' website. The video tutorial and the tips included in the Padlet board will help us guide our students before any written assignment and help them avoid the overuse of online translators (e.g., Google Translate). Additionally, Gloria Jones's website about Generation Z students will help us better understand the needs of our current students.

A final note. The artifacts showcased here present an already usable finished product, but they are not intended to be static. They have the potential to be just a starting point that will be further developed and grow into something bigger. I imagined them as a proof of concept of an idea. A way to make our graduate students develop new digital skills, and in some cases, discover their hidden talents. If you find something that sparks your interest, please do not hesitate to contact the project's author; a nice collaboration could start.

Enjoy!

Giovanni Zimotti

Director of Spanish Language Instruction

Division of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures

University of Iowa