COERLL @ SOCALLT

We had a notable presence at this year’s SOCALLT conference (South Central Association for Language Learning Technology). Language educators from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico gathered to talk all things edu-tech. So we took this opportunity to unveil some of COERLL’s new or updated open online language learning resources and get some f2f feedback.

• Web developer Rachael Gilg and corpus developer Arthur Wendorf gave a hands-on workshop for the new SpinTX beta release site of the Spanish in Texas corpus.
• COERLL director Carl Blyth gave a workshop demonstrating eComma, a web application and resources for social reading — groups of users annotating the same text together. He also gave a talk on called, “The Literary in the  Everyday: An OER for Creating Literacy Activities” — priming the public for this upcoming open resource.
• Karen Kelton and Nancy Guilloteau (of Francais interactif fame) gave a talk and demonstration of their new French OER — Enhancing French Skills.

Attendees were surprised and excited that all of our materials were open — available for the public to use, remix and share. People were curious about how we manage to create our menu of language learning resources — our answer to this is that open materials are created in community: in communities of dedicated language educators and scholars, students, technologists, programmers, web developers and end users who all have a stake in the game. Created for the people, by the people.

For those of you who were with us at SOCALLT, let us know what new idea, practice or tool you are excited about trying out in your teaching. What inspired you?

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If you’re coming to the IALLT conference in June, please come see us at our SpinTX and eComma presentations. And we’ll be in Hawaii at the CALICO conference, so come by our booth and check out our presentations!