From the desk of Valeria Belmonti.

Greetings from the Heritage Telecollaboration team!

We have had a very productive end of the Spring semester and would like to share some information on our recent activities.

Project Development

We recently completed the first pilots of our HT Spanish projects, entitled, respectively, “Latinos in the US” and “Mapas Alternos.” We also began the process of reviewing the results of the first pilot of the modules that we ran in Fall 2015 for Professor Li’s Chinese Heritage course at Queens College. We are excited about the outcome of our first pilots, and we expect to have the modules published on our website by the end of the Fall 2016 semester.

We have also recently completed the design of the modules for the Chinese Heritage course to be taught in Fall 2016 by Professor Cheng at Hunter College/CUNY in collaboration with Professor Guo’s English course at Inner Mongolia Normal University in Hohhot, China.

Professor Guo will be returning to China at the end of June, after spending a year in the US as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar.

We look forward to piloting the modules in Fall. We thank Professor Guo for her contribution and collaboration and wish her safe travels back to China.

Conferences

Several of our projects were presented at the 2016 COIL Conference in April and the CALICO conference in May. We thank the COIL and CALICO organizations for their support, those who attended our sessions for their interest and thorough questions, and the many other presenters at both conferences for giving inspiring sessions.

Laura Villa and María Jesús Barros García
COIL, April 25, 2016

Download presentation: PDF

 

Valeria Belmonti
COIL, April 25, 2016

Download presentation: PDF

Laura Villa (photo unavailable)
CALICO, May 12, 2016

Download presentation: PDF

We will present our HT projects at the 2016 ACTFL Convention in Boston in November. We will also share a booth at ACTFL with our sister LRCs and hold a Technology Roundtable Presentation on Telecollaborative Mobile Tools.

We will publish details on the location of the CILC booth and the dates and times of our presentations later on in the summer, so stay tuned!

Don’t forget that early bird registration for ACTFL will close on July 13.

Click here to register for ACTFL 2016!

Workshops

On May 26, we conducted a professional development workshop for some of the language teachers at St. Peter’s Boys High School in Staten Island, NY, in cooperation with the College of Staten Island. We overviewed free Web 2.0 and mobile tools, and discussed applications of the tools in alignment with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and Can-Do statements.

If you are an educator interested in organizing a technology professional development opportunity for your language teachers, and you are located in the New York metropolitan area, please contact Valeria Belmonti at vbelmonti@gc.cuny.edu.

Until next time! Ciao, hasta luego, 再见 !

This post was updated on June 17, 2016 with the presentations that we shared at the conferences, adapted for web publishing. All rights reserved.

Valeria Belmonti is Associate Director of Technology at CILC and Coordinator of the Heritage Telecollaboration projects.