Calendar
The 17th TROPOS Graduate Conference will take place October 12-13, 2018 with the topic “Whose Reality? Representing and Represented Identities in Arts and Politics”.The conference will welcome Alison James, Associate Professor of French Literature (University of Chicago) as a keynote speaker.
The Midwest Association for Language Learning Technology (MWALLT) will hold its 2018 conference on October 13, 2018. This conference will be of particular interest to all K-12 and post-secondary language instructors, to individuals affiliated with media centers or language labs, and to individuals interested in any facet of language learning technology.
Registration
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This is for in-person attendance at one of the host sites or hubs. Includes the full day of sessions at a hub or host site, and a 1-year membership to MWALLT.
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This is for in-person attendance at one of the host sites or hubs. Includes the full day of sessions at a hub or host site, and a 1-year membership to MWALLT.
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Includes the full day of sessions via virtual only attendance, and a 1-year membership to MWALLT.
In this presentation, attendees will learn about gamification in language learning contexts. I will discuss and present a theoretical framework that includes learner identity/identities, motivation, immersion, and agency, and discuss ways in which we can move beyond simplistic approaches to gamification based merely on PBL (Points, Badges, Leaderboards). I will illustrate this through a multi-year project, which involves beginning, intermediate and advanced students of German at a liberal arts college. During the project, students have created a virtual city, which plays out in hybrid learning spaces that involve a shifting array of face-to-face teaching and communicative technologies, such as gamification engines, virtual and physical makerspaces, creative production technologies, digital storytelling, games, and social media tools. Some of the innovative work comes from the flexible framework that allows educators to implement such simulations through high-tech, low-tech and no-tech approaches and use it with different textbooks or a textbook-free approach. The gamification approach is particularly exciting because it allows students to choose different paths and guide her/him through the imagined virtual or hybrid world.
The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) was created as a resource for actors and linguists. As part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between an English language teacher and a theatre teacher, acting students collected dialect samples from international students and published them to IDEA’s online repository. These interviews created opportunities to foster greater integration of international students among university communities. In a mutually beneficial project, international students interacted with native speakers while acting students were exposed to diverse accents and cultures.
In this session, participants will get the opportunity to try Pear Deck, an app that allows students to engage in class in a variety of ways using a mobile device. Examples will be given, and the presenter will talk about how she used it both in a language class and in a literature in translation class. This will lead to a discussion amongst all participants about the pros and cons of engagement using a mobile device and suggestions for best ways to use mobile devices in class.
