LARC

This fall, LARC is hosting a new series of Online Webinars.  These free workshops are designed for language educators and will highlight ways to use social media tools like blogs and youtube in the language classroom.

The sessions are held each Thursday at 4 PM (PST) in our Elluminate classroom. The sessions include demonstration as well as time for you to practice using the technology.  We want you to leave the session with a good pedagogical approach and the technical skills to make it work. Join live or watch the archives when you can.

We’ll be covering ways to use blogs in the classroom for the next 3 weeks, then will focus on ways to use some of youtube’s hidden (and powerful) features.  The Social Media Web site at LARC has all the information you need, including the webinar link and registration form.

August 10th to August 14th, 2009

The Social Media Summer Institute will be delivered from LARC at San Diego State University from Aug 10 – 14th, 2009. For the first time, we’re broadcasting a summer institute online for anyone who’d like to participate. National and International CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) experts will be presenting using the Elluminate Live system for open meeting webinars so you can join in the fun for free from your favorite location.

Here’s the link to get more information about this institute:

—————————— SITE LINK ————————-

The MAIN LINK for connecting to LARC’s Social Media Summer Institute Blog is:

http://larc.sdsu.edu/socialmedia/

Here you will find the schedule for each day with information about each presentation and the presenters. We will also post other needed information here.

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Here’s the link needed to participate in this institute:

———— ONLINE MEETING ROOM LINK ————

The PARTICIPANT LINK for connecting to the Social Media MEETING ROOM is:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2009202&password=M.8D6FC70DD4EAE705ED5D3DA313097F (copy full link)

When linking to this address, no registration is needed. Just login with your name to enter the Meeting Room.

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Faculty Professional Development Day: 6 July 2009
Dr.  Mary Ann Lyman-Hager
Keynote address: Trans-Cultural, Trans-Lingual Competency: Achievable in our Time?

STARTalk Persian Summer Camp Program - July 6th – July 24th, 2009
STARTalk Turkish Summer Camp Program - August 10th – August 21st, 2009
Chinese Summer Program - August 4th – August 6th, 2009

University of Bahrain Teachers’ College
The director of the Arabic Programs, Dr. Hanada Taha-Thomure, was in Manama, Bahrain earlier in June 2009, to observe and evaluate the Arabic program at Bahrain Teachers College. The BTC is part of a new initiative within the University of Bahrain prepare world-class teachers.

Larc at the StarTalk Summer Institute at DePaul University
Dr. Hanada Taha-Thomure, offered a reading workshop at the StarTalk summer institute at DePaul University in the third week of June 2009. K-12 Arabic language teachers from around the nation were in attendance. The workshop trained teachers in reading strategies and types with a focus on guided reading.

Larc at MiddleBury’s Summer Program in CA
Dr. Taha-Thomure was invited to give a lecture at MiddleBury’s Arabic school in the third week of June 2009. The lecture whose title was “My Life in Lebanon” was attended by the whole school including 165 students and 30 teachers and staff members.

LARC Staff were in Washington DC on March 19th – 21st for the Title VI’s 50th Anniversay Conference. Our presentation titles, slides, and relevant links are listed below.

“Creating Learner Corpora from the Computer Assisted Screening Tool for Advanced Level Proficiency (CAST)”
Michael Trevor Shanklin, San Diego State University
(Right click to download the presentation slides)
View the CAST site

“Highlights of Materials and Curriculum Development for Less Commonly Taught Critical Languages: The Evolution of the Digital Media Archive”

Mary Ann Lyman-Hager, San Diego State University
Christopher Brown, San Diego State University
John Vitaglione, San Diego State University

“Creating Peace: Creating Effective Teachers of Arabic at SDSU and Bahrain Teachers’ College”
Hanada Taha-Thomure, San Diego State University
(Download the presentation slides)

Our Persian Director, Dr. Atefeh Oliai, has been working hard to prepare our Persian teachers for this year’s This year’s Persian Summer Camp.  Thanks to funding from STARtalk, we’ll be offering free Persian classes to students aged 7-18.  We’ve had over 60 students register so far.  

Visit the Persian Summer Camp web site, or the Persian Institute home page for more information. 

We’re holding a series of Brownbag Workshops at the LARC.  Check the schedule and sign up for any remaining sessions if you’re interested.  

Today’s session was called Youtube & Friends.  We looked at the more advanced features of youtube like setting up a channel, like we’ve done at LARC, then discussed ways to use captioning, and group annotations with our students.  Since the presentation slides don’t have any notes, I’m just sharing links from today’s session instead. 

Sign up for a free Youtube account and begin uploading videos to the world’s most popular video site, or check out any of the similar sites listed below.

• wordpress.tv – a site with instructional videos on how to use WordPress.
• keepvid.com – Want to download a video you find on youtube?  .flv or .mp4 formats
• teachertube.com & edublogs.tv- these sites specialize in K-12 videos.  An advantage of each of these sites is that they are safe for school districts and have content limited to videos for classes.
• dotsub.com – a site for uploading, transcribing, and translating videos.
• wordia.com – a visual dictionary where users upload videos that describe what a word means and use it in context.
• kaltura.com – collaborative video editing online.