My Observation

This past Tuesday I presented at the 2010 Regional World Languages Mini-Conference sponsored at the DCIU and hosted by my district at Strath Haven Middle School. My foreign language department chair at the high school thought so much of the work we've done over the last three years together that she asked if I would share with other teachers from around the county.

My session topic was Creating a Virtual Language Lab. Doc, as my department chair is commonly known, came to me in 2008 with a request for a digital language lab. After 30 years in the district, she knew that this was not likely to happen, but thanks today's technology it was no longer needed. After some research I came upon several web-based tools for speaking and listening activities that could be embedded in a wiki, blog, or web page. I also found a course management system (CMS) designed specifically for foreign language teachers. The best part is they were all free from universities with federal grant monies (I hope they remain free).

My presentation Tuesday was the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Dr. Ralph Swan, my advisor at Chestnut Hill, and Mark Finlayson, my director, both needed to observe my work in action at some point. Needless to say this really put the pressure on. I had to refresh my knowledge of the CMS tool. I was also concerned about the web-based tools because we had some troubles accessing them for the first few weeks of school, mainly due to our new filter system.

Prepping for my presentation took at least 5-6 hours. I created a 30+ slide show in Power Point. Recently I'd been using Prezi a lot but opted for something traditional because I was delivering a lot of information in a short period of time and did not want attendees to be distracted by a new tools that weren't apart of my presentation. That meant that I had to resist discussing Wikispaces and Glogs because I used my existing wiki to present. I created a new page for the conference and copied materials from my WSSD foreign language page. This allows me to present directly from my wiki and eliminates a need for handouts and notes. The only handout was a strip of paper with important links. I even created demo classes for attendees to explore the tool with the last 15 minutes of my 60 minute session.

Something I did differently this time was to include an evaluation form with Google Docs. I embedded it directly into the same wiki page. Overall, everyone was satisfied and appreciated having time to practice. Suggestions for improvement include firewalls, more practice time and less time on background. Spending too much time on the background is something I know I need to work on. I tend to ramble and give way too many details. I'm realizing that I should just jump right in. If people really want know the backstory they will ask. (As a matter of fact, I did the same thing at the beginning of this post). I really appreciate the feedback and plan to use this evaluation form from now on. I just have to brace myself for the criticism.

Overall, everything went very well. I'm glad I brought all of my tools with me so there were no problems with other people's equipment. I'm also glad that I saved practice time with the CMS tool until the end because there was some delay with account creation.