This is the jumping-off point for a series of websites which students in
Spanish conversation use to take a virtual tour of Madrid and then create
their own virtual tour of a Spanish city. The pages I created provide
links to sites in Spain which give cultural information about Spanish
cities, as well as providing pictures of interesting places to visit.
Students also use these sites to create three-day thematic trips, such as
a trip to picturesque castles in Spain.
This page describes three PowerPoint lessons. The first teaches students
about rhyme and meter in
Spanish-language poetry, as well as aspects of the
interpretation of poetry. This presentation uses a 17th
century Spanish sonnet. The second application presents the two Spanish
verbs "ser"
and "estar." Both of these verbs translate into English as "to be" and
occur in similar
sentence structures. Their meanings are, however,
quite different from one another. The third application presents the
linguistic concept of
aspect and how it applies to two past tense
Spanish verb forms - the preterite and the imperfect.
This is a link to a webpage designed to show students the typical
construction of an essay. The page gives the students an essay in
Spanish, plus an outline of the classic essay. When students click on the
parts of the outline, the corresponding portion of the essay is
highlighted. By moving the mouse over the highlighted section of the
essay, students see more detailed comments on the function of the title,
thesis statement, evidence, etc.
This page describes a long-standing application used in Spanish 276 to
teach aspects of the interpretation of Spanish-language literary texts. I
created this application to address the problem of students' attempts to
read and interpret fictional works as if they were factual texts. This
page includes a link to the Language Resource Center's list of workshops
for faculty. The link contains instructions for downloading VIXEn (Video
Interactive Exercise Engine), which can be used on a Mac to create
interactive lessons like John Howell.
This link will display an example of a use of the
Microsoft Word commenting tools. For a final assignment in Spanish 276, I
put a short story called "Pollito chicken" on our CourseTools site with
instructions on how to use Word commenting tools. Students were told to
use these tools to
discuss the author's use of cultural references in the story. Students
chose the references they wished to comment upon and then submitted their
marked-up version of the story to the CT site. As a reader moves the
cursor over a highlighted portion of the text, the student's comments
appear in a new window. This link will display a picture of what it
looks like when the cursor is moved over one highlighted phrase.