Embedded Files
Peer-to-Peer Mentorship: VR Technology Integration with World Language Teaching
To complete an assignment for a methods course, I chose to utilize services from the Hill Library Virtual Reality Studio at NC State University. My motivation for this had two components. First, I wanted to explore using technology to support integration of culture into the beginner Spanish curriculum. Second, I wanted to help my peers gain an understanding of what technology resources are available to them as instructors, given that many of them were beginner teachers with little or no experience.
While at the VR studio, I asked my peers to imagine they were novice Spanish students. While working in pairs, they practiced giving directions in Spanish, a common Novice language task. Instead of just imagining a location or using a paper map for inspiration, however, students took turns exploring their partner’s hometown while wearing a VR headset paired with Google Earth software. The partner not wearing the headset would give instructions in Spanish about where to go and the partner wearing the headset would do their best to follow those instructions. Both the instructor and the non-headset partner were able to see the surroundings of the headset partner via an associated computer monitor.
Image courtesy of D.H. Hill Library - North Carolina State University
Informally, my peers shared positive feedback after completing the lesson, mentioning that they enjoyed the personal connections they were able to make with their peers and the place(s) they visited. We theorized that this heightened sense of connection would help novice learners be more engaged with lesson content and spur higher levels of motivation given the lesson’s enhanced contextualization. Additionally, we discussed other applications of the technology, including visiting famous cultural landmarks, comparing different architectural styles or observing differences in town and city layouts that might be related to cultural identity.
As future instructors, my peers also shared that they were pleased to learn about technology resources of which they were previously unaware. They also mentioned that having a chance to interact with the VR studio equipment and personnel before using it in a lesson themselves helped them feel less intimidated. I am excited to see how we might continue to utilize these resources in the future!
Workshop: How to Enable and Employ Zoom Features for Simultaneous Interpretation
During my time working as an interpreter, many of our meetings and parent workshops had to be conducted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This presented a need to adapt our language access services, and the Zoom simultaneous interpretation features soon became a tool the Family Engagement Team used daily. As more administrators became aware of our services, we had more and more requests for a training workshop teaching how to enable and use these features. Thus the Administrator’s Workshop for Zoom Interpretation was born. I conducted several workshops in English for principals of various age groups during online synchronous meetings with time for questions. The presentation-based tutorial was also shared with all colleagues via email so anyone could use it as a reference guide or for self-paced, self-directed learning.
We also had requests to teach families how to correctly self-sort into the appropriate language channel once they entered the Zoom meeting. I used screen recordings paired with various audio files in English, Spanish, Karen and Burmese to create instructional videos that could be played at the start of each meeting. This helped reduce technology barriers to particpation among our LEP families.
A second iteration of teaching the Zoom features content occurred in an applied linguistics course conducted in Spanish. The sample slides shown below are from this presentation. Additionally there is a still image showing an instructional video I created for Orange County Schools in use to walk parents through the process of connecting to their preferred audio channel.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse