Arthur H. Wendorf II - Teaching With Technology

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My Academic Links:

- Teaching Philosophy
- Course Description
- Spanish Resources
- Microteaching
- Pedagogical Innovation
- Reading Activity
- Curriculum Vitae
- Research

My Personal Links:

- The Wendorfian Times
- YouTube

Other Academic Links:

- Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
- Spanish Basic Language Program
- ANGEL
- TWTC

Pedagogical Innovations

Course Web Space:

The primary resource for any Spanish course at PSU is its ANGEL Course Page. This utility allows instructors to post readings, homework assingments, quizzes, and other course materials for students to access from any computer with internet access at a time prespecified by the instructor. Students can use this web space to submit online assignments and to communicate with each other and with the instructor. Here is what the front page of a course web space can look like, with tabs accross the top for access to the various utilities and icons in the body which allow access to the different assignments, etc.

Online Grade Book:

One of the primary functions of ANGEL is to allow students to have easy and immediate access to their grades at any point during the semester. To accomplish this ANGEL provide an online Grade Book. ANGEL automatically grades the quizzes that are administered on ANGEL and places those grades in the Grade Book. Additionally, it is possible for instructors to insert other grades, such as from exams, and to set up formlae for ANGEL to calculate running final grades so that students can always know exactly where they stand, gradewise, in the course. Here is a sample Grade Book Screenshot with the students' names blurred out:

Online Quizzes:

The main source of grades for the online grade book is the quizzes that instructors post for students on ANGEL. ANGEL provides instructors with a great variety of options for the creation of such quizzes. The screenshot below shows a portion of a Spanish quiz created on ANGEL for an introductory Spanish course. This quiz is a vocabulary quiz which tests for vocabulary related to travel. As can be seen, ANGEL has allowed the instructor to insert images into the quiz. The questions for this quiz use a traditional fill-in-the-blank format:

The following screenshot is from another introductory Spanish course quiz. This quiz is a grammar quiz which also uses images, although images are not required for ANGEL quizzes, and a traditional multiple choice question format. This quiz tests for the students' ability to correctly use the Spanish morphological future tense:

Online Communication:

Among the other tools provided by ANGEL are online discussion forums, which allow students and instructors to have running conversations, both public and private, about topics related to the course. The screenshot below shows how this feature can be used:

Another online communication feature provided by ANGEL is the online course calendar, which allows both instructors and students to post the times, locations and descriptions of events important to the course on a calendar which can be easily accessed by everyone participating in the course. The following screenshot shows an example of such a calendar in use: