Teaching with Technology
in Intermediate Spanish Courses

Dennis D. Pollard, Ph.D.
Intermediate Spanish Course Coordinator
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures


Spanish webtrips
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.


PowerPoint Lessons
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.


The Essay
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.


John Howell
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.


Microsoft Word Commenting Tools
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.