Tip of the Day to Sunset January 2025

The Language Center Tip of the Day blog will officially sunset in January 2025. We would like to thank our contributors and readers for their support!

The blog initially launched on this platform in March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid work-and-learn-from-home period, when the now retired director, Dan Soneson, was looking for a vehicle to share short and important technical information with language and culture instructors. The very first post was titled Starting your Zoom Meeting, addressing the most basic and immediate need of an instructor suddenly thrust into remote teaching. Over time, the range of topics deepened to include a variety of technical tools and pedagogical topics. The series on Jamboard proved particularly popular, with the Locate and Organize your Jamboards post being viewed over 1100 times. The primary goal of the blog was to share tips and tricks, but it was also a method of keeping the language and culture community connected during a very challenging time.

During the fully remote period, we aimed to publish multiple posts each week, which was a major undertaking. Many posts were written by Dan, and others were authored by a small but dedicated team of LC staff, and the occasional guest writer. On May 10, 2021, Dan published his final post on the blog; and later that summer, we all began the difficult return to campus.

In November 2022, interim director Beth Kautz with site designer Anna Hubbard relaunched the blog as a Drupal Lite site. The regrouped team posted less frequently than they did on the classic Tip of the Day blog, but the posts were often longer and geared towards a HyFlex, rather than fully remote, educational environment. After a year, along with staff transitions, maintaining a blog became challenging with the launch of the center’s social media nexus and course promotion initiatives. Of course, technology has evolved considerably since 2020, with Zoom updating its settings constantly, Jamboard being decommissioned, among many other changes.

Therefore, in January 2025, the Language Center will sunset both the Blogger and Drupal Lite forms of the blog. We have access to some readership data, and realize that the blogs are still being viewed. We encourage everyone who has content on the blogs that they find useful to copy it for themselves for use offline, or email elsie@umn.edu to request that we find a way to integrate currently relevant content into our main website.

Tip of the Day Returns

 Visit lctip.umn.edu

After a long break, the Language Center is pleased to resume posting tips about the teaching of languages and culture. We last posted on May, 10, 2021, and since then, many of you have returned to classroom instruction, albeit masked, while others continue to hone their remote teaching skills via Zoom. What remains constant across all modalities, however, is the need to be flexible and to adapt to new teaching and learning environments that will never be the same as they were pre-pandemic. In the coming months, we hope to share strategies that will build your confidence in managing both the online and in-person teaching environments, provide tips for using online tools more efficiently, and inspire you to try out new learning activities. 

We are pleased to announce a new platform for our blog as well. The Tip of the Day blog now has its own Drupal Lite website at https://lctip.umn.edu. One big advantage to using this new site is that its contents are accessible by the general UMN search engine. You can visit the new blog directly to see posts (and search for previous posts), and links to new blog content will be shared through ElsieTalk as well.

Happy Summer!

With this post the Tip of the Day will take a brief hiatus to gain some breathing room and take a look at where we’ve been and where we are going. We want to thank you for visiting the blog throughout the year (to date we have had over 8,000 visits to the site), and thank many of you for contributing to the tips we have collected. 

As we have noted several times, technology moves on, as do our circumstances. This past year has seen many changes to the Zoom application, including many new and useful features and several adjustments to the way things work in the application. Google continues to change applications in its sphere as well, and we have been able to highlight some of these changes in addition to some useful features that we ourselves hadn’t noticed before. We will continue to monitor these changes and issue updates as appropriate.

The academic environment has changed considerably as well and will continue to morph into new formats that combine some of the pre-pandemic activities as well as some of the approaches and activities that have evolved over the past year. We’d love to hear more from you about what you would like to continue doing in the changed and changing environment going forward. 

At this point I want especially to thank the Tip of the Day team who have met regularly to explore ideas, who have discovered and written our Tips, and who have supported one another in testing out how the tips work in a class-like setting. My thanks go to Language Center staff Stephanie Treat, Beth Kautz, Carter Griffith, and Jonathan Prestrud, and to Chee-ia Thao, our undergraduate student contributor who provided a much-valued student perspective on many of the ideas we all batted around.

To close out the semester we have two tips for you as you enter the summer break:

1. We have heard from many of you that you just want to take a complete break from even thinking about language teaching and learning. This has been a difficult year, not only for students, but for instructors who have managed to keep heads above water under enormous pressure to maintain both a home life and a work life and to attend to needs both of family and of students. You are to be congratulated on surviving the year and on doing so while still providing an excellent learning experience for our students. You have earned a significant respite. So take some time for yourself in the next few weeks - turn off the sense of academic responsibility and chill out for awhile. That is what vacation is for -- to recharge batteries. It would be great to collect wonderful ideas of how you choose to do so. I plan to spend some time playing the mandolin and taking pictures.
   
   
2. When you do start thinking about next semester, please consider the staff at the Language Center as your partners. The Language Center is here to contribute to the teaching and learning of languages at the University of Minnesota in a number of ways. We can consult with you and work with you on pedagogical approaches, activity development, project definition, assessment options, conversation partnerships, resource sharing, and creative and innovative projects. Please feel free to contact us about anything concerning your teaching and your students’ learning. 

And now we say “Cheerio!” Thanks for everything, and have a restful, relaxing, and invigorating summer!

But Wait, There's More: Some Light Summer Reading

Many readers access the Tip of the Day blog through ElsieTalk, which provides a direct link to new content every week. These Tip of the Day articles typically end with external content: articles or other resources from outside the blog that seemed timely, relevant or interesting. As the blog winds down for the year, the Tip team is providing a summary of all of these resources from Academic Year 2020-2021 in one convenient location.

Several of the resources come from The FLTMAG, a free magazine on technology integration in language teaching and learning published by IALLT. This magazine is worth visiting periodically, as content is published regularly on a variety of topics written by educators from across the country.

Technology: Big Picture and Current Situation

• CEHD Connect Magazine has a profile of Shantia Kerr Sims, associate professor and coordinator of the educational technology program at the University of Central Missouri titled Harnessing the Power of Educational Technology: Pandemic reveals the strength of the discipline.
• Luca Giupponi, Michigan State University, has authored The Pandemic as a Catalyst for Transformation about the experience of the past year from the perspective of a technologist.
• Instructors considering teaching partially in-person Fall 2021 may be inspired by Rick Treece’s article Face-à-Face, which details his experience using a HyFlex model to teach FREN 3014 French Phonetics during Fall 2020.
• The Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team in LATIS has provided six short Concrete Ideas for Building Community and Making Online Learning More Engaging to help instructors build community and connection.
• Check out Online Teaching Tips for the Plague-Averse, a public Facebook group for exchanging brief, helpful suggestions for teaching remotely. This group is administered by Eliot Borenstein from New York University, and Shannon Donnally Spasova from Michigan State University.
• The UMN Academy of Distinguished Teachers have published their Tips for Teaching in 2020-21, ideas culled from their summer 2020 Happy Hour discussions.
• Are you looking for a simple resource for students on learning languages remotely? The University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute has produced a printable two-page document titled Tips for Learning Remotely.

Technology: Tips and Tricks for Video

• If you or your students need to record video with a smartphone this semester, check out the short YouTube video produced by IT with tips and tricks for recording with the highest quality possible.
• IT has handy troubleshooting tips for these common Kaltura Capture problems: Recording Doesn't Finish Uploading and In a Multi-Source Recording, Camera View Appears Large, Screen Recording Small (PIP)
• If you find that it it taking too long to upload your recorded videos, check out IT’s helpful guides: Kaltura: Tips for Reducing Upload Times in Kaltura Capture and Zoom: Tips for Reducing File Size and Upload Times for Local Recordings
• The EDUCAUSE Review has offered a set of recommendations to help instructors get the most out of asynchronous video activities in their courses in the article Asynchronous Video Conversations: 11 Tips and Best Practices.

Technology: Tips and Tricks for Zoom

• If you are looking for ideas for annotating student assignments, see One Cheap (And One Even Cheaper!) Way to Annotate Homework, by Shannon Donnally Spasova in The FLTMAG, which includes the innovative idea of using Zoom’s annotate feature, not while hosting a meeting, but instead to annotate students’ written work.
• Brian Barnett (Director of Language Instruction in French) and Fidele Tchoffo Tsasse (Graduate Student in French) authored Using Breakout Rooms to Break It Up: Lessons from an Intensive Summer French Class. Zoom’s Breakout Room features have changed since their summer class, but their advice remains as relevant as ever.

Technology: Tips and Tricks for Canvas

• The New Rich Content Editor (RCE), which debuted in Canvas in January, changes the way accessible content is created and how users of assistive technologies navigate the toolbar. See Accessibility and the New RCE for guidance on ensuring your content is accessible, and tips for navigating the system.
• Are you confused by the new Canvas Rich Content Editor? Let Shana Crosson from LATIS talk you through it in her video New Canvas Content Editor.

Technology: Tips and Tricks for Other Tools

• See Three Flipgrid Hacks, the first of a new series on Michigan State University’s Online Language Teaching blog that will share hacks for using popular tools for language instruction.
• Shannon Donnally Spasova from Michigan State University, continues to publish interesting ideas for making language learning fun in The FLTMag. Her most recent article, Flippity for Online Games and Tools, introduces Flippity, which offers a set of 25 templates that allow you to easily turn a Google spreadsheet into a variety of online classroom activities, tools, and games.
• If you’re looking for ideas for an online information gap activity, check out the variation of Clue that Shannon Donnally Spasova from Michigan State University (MSU) created for her Russian class. She describes it in her Rethinking Index Card Games for the Online Classroom post in MSU’s Online Language Teaching blog.
• Looking for more ideas for using Jamboard? Check out Getting out of a Jam with Google Jamboards from The FLTMAG, a free magazine on technology integration in language teaching and learning.
• Michigan State University’s Online Teaching Blog features an article by Alice Musick McLean on Blogging Through the Slog of the Quarantine about the experience of incorporating blogging into an intermediate-level Portuguese class.

Other

• The University Relations blog has a post titled Keeping Internal Communications in the Spotlight with ideas for effective internal communications. Their thoughtful advice can be applied in many settings, including the classroom.
• This Teaching with Writing Blog post offers tips for Encouraging Audience-Accessible Writing Habits.
• The Good Teacher Project, a 1992 Language Center video production, is now online through LC Elevator. This is a collection of interviews with University of Minnesota instructors who have been designated as excellent pedagogues. A downloadable transcript is included.

I'm Taking it With Me: Tools and techniques to keep

After teaching remotely for a full academic year, instructors' toolkits for creating scaffolded lessons and engaging students online have grown.  Not only have we been introduced to new tools and techniques, we have come to really embrace some of them!  We may ask ourselves, how we ever taught without them or why we didn't try that activity sooner.  The Tip of the Day staff recently asked instructors to share their perspective on which tools or techniques they plan to keep using in their instruction -- whether in-person in a classroom, asynchronous online, or remote via video-conferencing.  Here are a few of their ideas:

Canvas quizzes prior to class session

Over the past year, Spanish Director of Language Instruction, Mandy Menke, has asked students to complete simple Canvas quizzes based on the assigned reading.  Each quiz ended with prompts for students to tell her what questions they still had or what they wanted to discuss in person.  As Mandy says:

It gave me great insight into what my students were thinking, understanding, connecting, questioning, etc., and it helped me to plan and structure classes to better meet their needs."  In addition, "It held them accountable and supported some basic understandings (Correct answers were always available for T/F questions, multiple choice questions, etc.).

Online submission of assignments through Canvas

For instructors who until this past year regularly received student essays on paper and graded them by hand, switching to online submissions and digital grading has been an adjustment.  German instructor Ari Hoptman, however, has found a silver lining, in that he needn't worry too much about his penmanship anymore!  In addition to being able to read his comments, students also have an accurate record of which assignments they have submitted and whether the instructor has graded it yet.

Using Jamboard to practice vocabulary 

The number of Tip of the Day posts about Jamboard is an indication of how popular this online collaborative whiteboard tool has become. Dutch instructor Jenneke Oosterhoff reports:

Jamboard is a great tool to practice vocabulary in particular, but it can also be used for expressing opinion, practicing grammar, anything really. It's especially handy because you can use a picture as the background and have students use sticky notes to name items in the picture or say something about what is happening in the picture.

Students like it too, because it is so interactive and they can use it to review vocabulary independently later on.

Synchronous collaborative work in Google Docs or Jamboard

In situations where it is difficult to gauge the progress or accuracy of each group during a class activity, using one, common editable document, such as a Google Doc or Jamboard, has been a game-changer for German instructor Ginny Steinhagen. 

Students use these collaborative documents to practice grammar or to answer questions about a reading or listening assignment.  For Ginny, it means that "When they are working, I can monitor their progress and have a good sense of how much time they need, and I can raise questions to help them self-correct mistakes."  

Thanks to all the instructors who shared their ideas with us for this post.  As you wrap-up the semester and reflect on your own teaching practices, we hope you too have something good from this year to take with you into the future.