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!