Integrating Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom

 Before your next class :

1. Read the article...

- Read the article from the Heinle Professional Series in Language Instruction, vol. 1, Teaching with Technology, "FLTEACH: Online Professional Development for Preservice and Inservice Foreign Language Teachers" by LeLoup & Ponterio. Pick two of the discussion questions at the end of the article and write a one paragraph response.

2. Begin planning project

- Begin to plan ideas for your own project (see mini-project 1). What information do you want to present?  Keep it simple.  Begin to gather your materials and bring photos to class for scanning or editing. This is just to get you thinking at this point.

- Review some notions about electronic character sets.  You do not need to read all of these pages, but be sure to take a look at a couple to get an idea of some of the general concepts and to refresh your memory of the basics from class discussion. Character sets and codes can be confusing when the concepts are new. Are there aspects of this that you find confusing?:

A tutorial on character code issues.
Dan's Mail Format Site: Body: Character Sets.
8-bit vs. 7-bit (ASCII character set, ASCII FAQ).
An Introduction to MIME.
MIME--Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions - From UNIX Unleashed
ISO-LATIN-I (aka ISO-8859-1): The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup, Roman Czyborra.
Unicode - The Unicode home page. Be sure to look at code charts with sample glyphs.
Email: How it works

- Send an email message to a partner with a copy to ponterior@cortland.edu using at least one word that requires accented letters (évidemment).  Send a carbon copy to yourself and check the email headers to see what character set and encoding you are using.

You may need to examine the preferences/options in your email software to find out how to make this work, though most email software these days will not require any changes in preferences. Note: If you can't get this to work, that too is part of the learning experience. Let me know what you tried in that case.

5. Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia

Examine the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia listed in the syllabus. Does your school have a clear policy?