Last week, COERLL had the pleasure of being invited by the Region XIII Education Service Center to present on our work at the Languages Other Than English Institute 2014, held here in Austin, TX. This year, the Institute focused on “Celebrating Our Global Learners,” with sessions like Culturally Responsive Teaching in the LOTE Classroom (Tina Dong – Austin ISD) and Strategies and Steps in Differentiation: Blended and Flipped Classrooms (Sheila Jordan – Round Rock ISD). Our first session, Open Educational Resources for Language Learning, introduced educators to the wide variety of foreign language Open Educational Resources available through COERLL and from a variety of online referral websites like OER Commons, MERLOT, Language Box, Jorum, etc. Our second session, SpinTX – Bringing Authentic Spanish Videos into the Classroom, provided a more in depth look at SpinTX – a website created here at COERLL featuring authentic heritage spanish videos for language learning.
It is always a pleasure to meet and speak with teachers directly about their needs and to hear more about the challenges in finding “the right” materials for teaching. We are always curious to know more about what teachers need in order to be effective in their teaching – whether it is finding high quality and applicable teaching materials to supplement or accompany a textbook, learning how to effectively use various technologies and web tools to create materials, or just discovering a forum to speak with others about their experiences and interests. Understandably, it is difficult to sometimes know where to start. S0, we encourage you to check out our recent talk from the LOTE Institute here and if you have any questions about the websites and resources mentioned or have suggestions of other great content, please get in touch! And, if you’re specifically interested in SpinTX, be sure to check out the new Lesson Ideas page on the SpinTX website.
