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CO 83.1 [Fall 2005], pp. 26-28: 2005 ACL Institute pre-Institute workshop: Micheal Posey, "Online Exercises & Quizzes"; European Latin Conference in Cambridge, England; Swiss & Danish software for Latin; Cambridge Online Latin Project (COLP) update; 20th anniversary edition of ACL Software Directory for the Classics released.
A Summer Full of Classical Computing
This proved to be a very busy summer for me when it came to workshops on classical
computing. It started at the ACL Institute in Albuquerque and continued a month
later at the European Latin Conference in Cambridge, England.
Micheal Posey kicked things off with the pre-Institute workshop on “Making
the Internet Work for You: Putting Exercises and Quizzes Online.” Micheal
kept people both busy and amused, as he led them around to some of the more
popular and lesser known web sites which provide easy-to use templates for creating
your own interactive online materials, as well as offering those made by others.
Some sites are free, while others will charge a subscription fee for regular
use and more support services, such as maintaining student records and providing
e-mail discussion lists.
First, Posey talked about some of the sites for basic tools and services that
a teacher can find handy, such as blogs, grade books, and web-based discussion
groups. Most people think of bloggers as people who keep online journals and
commentaries, which have become a source of amusement for some and a source
of incisive, investigative journalism for others. But Posey pointed out how
he uses a blog site for posting syllabi and everyday announcements to his students.
The most popular site for this purpose is Blogger (www.blogger.com), which is
now part of the Google empire. Once you set up a free blog site of your own,
using their template, it becomes a sub-site of Blogspot.com.
Another way to keep students informed is to set up a discussion group at Yahoo
Groups. They, too, provide a very easy-to-use template for groups of all kinds
to have a web site with photo albums, link lists, and a group calendar, along
with e-mail services, such as a postings archive, scheduled reminders, and an
automatic distribution of all e-mail submitted by the group members (www.groups.yahoo.com).
For record-keeping, you can find assistance from Gradekeeper (www.gradekeeper.com)
and “The Homework Site” (www.thehomeworksite.com), among others.
The former uses a downloadable program which communicates with the web site,
while the latter is all web-based. They both depend on subscription fees for
support ($20-25 per year per class).
Playing with Hot Potatoes at Institute
When it comes to online exercises and quizzes, there are a wealth of templates
available. Some are free, others are not. There are PowerPoint templates for
some of the most popular TV game shows, such as Jeopardy, The Weakest Link,
and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (208.183.128.3/tutorials/PPT-games/). Quia
is a popular site with templates for 12 different quiz and game formats, including
flashcards, “Concentration,” and “Hangman” (www.quia.com).
If you sign up for class use of the site ($50 per year), you can set up your
own teacher home page with extra record-keeping facilities. Try a free 30-day
trial, and look for the many Latin exercises there, including those from fellow
ACL members, like Alana Lukes (pvilatin2) and Virginia Baird (voc2), who happened
to be in the workshop.
Other popular sites that you might want to investigate are: Puzzlemaker, EclipseCrossword,
Spellmaster, QuizStar, Flashcard Exchange, and EasyTestMaker. Try the usual
dot-com URL, or just Google their name to track down their respective web sites.
Finally, Posey spend much of the morning session demonstrating and letting attendees
experiment with Hot Potatoes, a downloadable program which creates web-based
exercises in six common formats: multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled sentence,
crossword, matching/ordering, and gap-filling. The program is free for academic
applications, if they are made publicly available online. It is published by
Half-Baked Software and available from the Univ. of Victoria site in Canada
(hotpot.uvic.ca). A couple of good examples of classical exercises created with
Hot Potatoes are: Robert Cape’s Internet Workbook for the Oxford Latin
Course (Figure 1, artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/cml/rcape/latin/) and Jim Johnson’s
Supplementary Exercises for Athenaze (artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/cml/jjohnson/athenaze/instructions.html).
European Classical League in the Making?
While the Cambridge Latin Conference was ostensibly concentrating on European
perspectives toward the teaching of Latin in the 21st century, there were actually
9 out of 90 attendees there from the U.S. I was very appreciative of the opportunity
to learn about the diversity of attitudes toward Latin’s place in the
curriculum from country to country, especially in relation to history, native
language, and other modern languages. The varying methods of integration all
make sense in their own national contexts but make it very difficult to come
up with a collective European approach to their assessment and possible revision.
Nevertheless, the European attendees seemed enthusiastic in their support of
a more united front in fighting the general decline in Latin enrollments across
their continent.
One area that they have certainly been working hard in, of course, is that of
technological applications. This was an excellent chance for them to show each
other what they have been up to in their home countries, and I was happy to
hear about it all myself, so that I could spread the word “across the
pond.” I went to the entire series of workshops in the Cambridge Classics
Department’s excellent computer lab, and this is what I learned--and what
you can try out for yourself.
Swiss & Danish Electronic Textbooks
First in the line-up was Latinum Electronicum, which its creators, Irene Burch,
Simone Hiltscher, and Rudolph Wachter, are calling “a playful online Latin
course for university beginners.” This project is based at the University
of Basel, but it is supported by a consortium of three Swiss universities, all
of whom use different Latin textbooks, but are looking for more practice with
the language outside the classroom. Hence, the online materials are designed
as a completely separate textbook and workbook which uses mostly the vocabulary
which is common to all three printed texts. They have used very creative means
to animate grammatical explanations, to which they hope to add audio in the
future, and there is a wealth of exercises using several interesting formats,
such as moving urns around to catch forms falling from the sky and matching
verb forms of different tenses in a “Concentration”-style game (Figure
2).
In the evaluation surveys of students who had used the program, it gained high
scores for usefulness, even though 25% never used it and only 25% used it more
than 5 hours in a term. The other half still relied mainly on their printed
text and found it difficult to motivate themselves to spend the extra time in
the computer lab. Since the entire system is hosted by WebCT, it is only accessible
to students with passwords, but they expect to have a public demo online by
the time you read this (www.unibas.ch/latinum-electronicum/).
Another workshop was led by the amazing Hans Orberg, whom some of you may recognize
as the author of the Lingua Latina textbook series, the only elementary Latin
text to instruct in an all-Latin environment, using graphics to build vocabulary
and explain grammatical points. It turns out that Orberg recently teamed up
with a computer programmer to transfer all of the textbook material onto CD
and add interactive exercises, maintaining the same rigorous standards—buttons
and menus are all in Latin, too! It’s quite impressive to behold and experiment
with. Both print and electronic versions are being published in the U.S. by
Focus Publishing (www.pullins.com), and you can find out more (in several languages)
from Orberg’s own site (www.lingua-latina.dk). Apparently, his text series
is quite popular in Asia and other places that do not have Latin texts available
in their own languages.
Reading Support from Cambridge & Denmark
Alongside the two electronic Latin textbooks demonstrated, there were two online
programs designed to support the reading process which is taught in more advanced
Latin courses. First, Jo Hermann of Denmark explained how she had taken on the
tedious chore of creating a complete gloss of the all the required Latin passages
which her students read. This is a diverse selection from a wide variety of
authors, including some medieval Danes. Every word in the texts is hyperlinked
to its respective paradigm chart to help students parse a form, and the gloss
sits beside the passage, as it would in a printed text. The meanings, of course,
are all in Danish, but the hypertext grammar might be useful to students in
other countries. The site is completely free to the public, if you’d like
to see it for yourself (Figure 3, www.e-latin.dk).
I wrote once before about the CATR (Computer-Assisted Text Reading) Project,
when they were looking for more test sites for their materials a couple of years
ago (CO 81.3 Spring 2004, p. 114). It is based at Cambridge University and is
working with Cambridge University Press (CUP) to create full hypertext versions
of many titles in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Commentaries text series. Margaretha
Debrunner Hall gave a thorough explanation of how it works and an update on
where they are at. Every word in the texts is linked to a parser/dictionary,
and many words have hyperlinked notes, replacing foot and end notes. Eventually,
these hypertexts should be available for licensing from CUP. In the meantime,
most of them are restricted to student-password access, but anyone can try out
a few sample texts (www.classics.cam.ac.uk/catr/).
Cambridge Online Tries Plans ‘myCLC’
The Cambridge Online Latin Project (COLP, www.cambridgescp.org), which I’ve
already written about twice in the recent past (CO 81.3 Spring 2004, p. 115,
and CO 82.1 Fall 2004, p. 27), has not been resting on its laurels. Martin Hodges
and Tony Smith gave a tantalizing presentation at this European conference,
describing their plans to offer an extremely thorough customization option for
the online Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) materials, tentatively known as “myCLC.”
This will allow both teachers and students to set a wide variety of preferences
and parameters, which the site will automatically load as soon as they sign
in with their username and password. Concomitant with the release of this desirable
new embellishment will be the charging of a nominal subscription fee for use
of the materials. This new source of funding may, in turn, spur further developments
in their web-based services.
Greek Lexicon & Word Empire on CD
While all of these exciting developments were unfolding at the summer conferences,
there was no dearth of new software being released on CD. First, the Hellenists
in the crowd may be thrilled to hear that there is now a CD-version of Liddell
and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ)—that’s the complete
ninth edition with the 1996 supplement fully integrated into it. This coup was
accomplished by Logos Bible Software, working with Oxford University Press,
and the list price is $145. I will write more about this next time, when I have
had a chance to test it out more myself and have more room to write. In the
meantime, I should mention that they are doing a “pre-pub” promotion
to drum up support for putting the complete Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD) on
CD. For more info, contact them at Logos Bible Software, 1313 Commercial St.,
Bellingham WA 98225; tel. 800-875-6467; web: www.logos.com.
Another new release is a program called Word Empire by Brett Brunner, a Latin
teacher from Scottsville, VA (Figure 4). Brunner has created a graphically organized
word list of etymological derivatives from Greek and Latin roots, using over
a thousand different word “trees,” each based on a classical “root,”
with the branches and leaves of the tree filled with English derivatives, which
are color-coded by level of difficulty and tagged when they are specific to
a particular field of study. Each tree fills a page of a PDF document, which
can be read and searched with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. Looking
up one word will lead the user to many other related words, and the color-coding
and tagging are meant to help her focus her attention on those most relevant
to her level and area of interest. Word Empire (single $45; site $295) is available
from the ACL’s TMRC and its publisher: Star Nemeton, 154 Warren Ferry
Rd., Scottsville VA 24590; tel. 434-960-9657; web: www.wordempire.com.
2005 Software Directory Hits the Street
Just a quick confirmation that the 20th anniversary edition of the ACL Software
Directory for the Classics is now available from the ACL’s TMRC, as promised
($15). The abridged online version has also been updated (www.centaursystems.com/soft_dir.html).
I would like to add a special thank you to the ACL’s Scholarship Committee
for providing the financial assistance which made it possible for me to attend
the Cambridge Latin Conference. And to everyone else out there: be sure to keep
the ACL scholarships in mind when you are looking at those enticing opportunities
for professional development, both at home and abroad!