I propose a Talk and Play session to discuss, share and play with our favorite free apps. We will talk about how we use them for learning, teaching, research and assessment.

Bring your favorite device, list of apps and uses, and best practices/tips. Let’s share!

I will discuss how I use apps in my language classroom to engage students fulfilling the National Language Standards- the 5’Cs (Community, Connection, Comparison, Communication, Culture)

World-ReadinessStandardsforLearningLanguages

I will share how I use

• Socrative
• Snapchat
• Apalabrados *word with friends
• Groupme
• Tellagami
• Threering
• Zite
• Duolingo/Memrise

I would like to create a centralized location where we can share list of apps, best practices and uses. We can discuss the best platform for this location in this session.

During any discussion I have about social media or other technology as a pedagogical tool, I get excited and start imagining lots of possibilities. Then I try to apply them in class. One challenge I’ve faced is that students don’t always know as much about using technology (i.e., computers, the Internet, applications, etc.) as I expect. I would like to open up a discussion with others about this issue – what are your experiences? how have you handled these challenges? what tools do they know that you don’t?

I propose a hybrid Talk-Make session focused on the creative and effective uses of social media platforms in the classroom. The humanities share a core knowledge structure that is both narrative and dialectical; therefore students of the humanities can benefit from experiential understanding of these structures. As some of us know (depending on our level of engagement), social media platforms engage and enable this same style of dialogue. Most students, however, engage with social media in a comparatively “shallow” manner—focusing more on people than knowledge. I’d like to explore the ways that we, as educators, researchers, and knowledge-makers, can help our students use what they know to discover what they have yet to know. As they do so, I believe they become active participants in new ways of meaning-making.  

Talk

For the Talk portion, I would like to share briefly a project my students did this semester that utilized Storify <www.storify.com> to bring together digital information in a narrative format. I believe the framework of the project has applications across multiple disciplines. The Storify format allowed students to engage course materials with outside materials, placing them in dialogue with others while asserting their own voices. Along the way, we also utilized Twitter as part of the larger classroom landscape, which served as a springboard for ideas, a platform for discussion, and interactive gateway to the outside world. On every level, these technologies enhanced student involvement in the classroom, student learning, and – that thing every instructor seeks to achieve – student desire to pursue more learning. I’ll bring copies of the assignment and post a link to it and some student projects on our website prior to the conference.

Make

For the Make portion, I want participants to

1. Bring ideas, questions, and desired outcomes for classroom social media projects in the works;
2. Share any successful projects they have developed;
3. Leave with finished (or fleshed-out) products and a variety of useful materials from colleagues.

Some Platforms I am interested in hearing more about: Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Vine, and Google+. I hope participants will add others.

Preparation & Follow-Up
I encourage participants to arrive pre-registered with a Google account for the use of joint Google docs; be prepared to collaborate and share. Bring your work on a flash drive and be prepared to Make! (Listening contributors are welcome, too!)

I’d like to create a centralized location online for continued collaboration on these, and future, digital/educational projects. We can discuss the best platform for this location in the session. One of our THATCamp coordinators has offered UF’s Digital Humanities Project Showplace <cms.uflib.ufl.edu/DigitalHumanities/UFDigitalHumanitiesProjects&gt; as one viable option.

When I began my own research project as a second-year undergraduate, I set out to map the world of Dante’s Commedia through the use of GIS software. However, I eventually left that project behind and pivoted into a more traditional topic and goal. Although I am pleased with how my undergraduate thesis turned out, I would like to talk about undergraduates and projects in digital humanities. As the bar continues to be raised for undergraduate research projects, I wonder how digital skills can enhance and shape future work. This discussion will likely yield more questions than I can predict—here are some of my own to get us started:

• What types of results do instructors consider digital humanities projects?
• What kinds of traditional disciplines and courses lend themselves to these projects?
• What type of skill set would students need in order to do these projects?
• What resources and support can ensure the success of undergraduate work in the digital humanities?
• How early is too early to get started?

Despite focusing this proposal on the undergraduate experience, I think the questions I have outlined could also be extended to other levels of students and instructors themselves.

Magic Mirror Theater is an open-source web application designed to facilitate the study of classical drama and potentially other forms of literature by enhancing the current teaching methodologies in higher education, using an experiential-learning augmented-reality environment. It allows instructors and students to use their classroom projector or personal computer screen as a “magic mirror” in which they can see themselves standing on the stage of an ancient theater digitized in life size, holding digital replicas of ancient props, wearing digital costumes, and interacting with virtual mechanical devices used during theatrical performance in the Greco-Roman world.  A library of 3D objects thematically categorized will be available along with options for selecting theatrical space, perspective, replicating user’s body on the stage in various arrangements (chorus/main actors), and other features. This system aims to help students and future scholars understand the circumstances of performance and comprehend the architectural and spatiotemporal logistics of Classical Drama.

Gillian Lord & Jesse Gleason
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies (UF)

In spite of technology’s growth in many aspects of academia, language learning programs still tend to view digital delivery as an afterthought rather than a starting point. As a result, the tools used in language programs and classes do not take advantage of the available technologies to motivate and engage students. We propose that we need to rethink the role that technology can play in the teaching and learning of foreign languages, and that we need to design pedagogical materials from the ground up, conceived of and implemented for digital environments from the outset. In this session we review the fundamental principles that have guided the creation of two different online environments for beginning Spanish: UFO’s Beginning Spanish I course, which recently won an Online Excellence Education Award in the area of Student Engagement, and Enchufes, the first-ever native-digital beginning Spanish learning “text.” We then highlight the features of these two programs and discuss their development and implementation. Participants will work through and engage with core elements of these platforms, and will gain experience with the tools they use, such as  videoconferencing software, collaborative word processing tools, and others. We will showcase how these programs promote learner autonomy, emphasize communication and engagement and, in sum, are working to transform online language learning.