Digital literacies in a distance education Spanish course
Silvia Rodriguez Sabater & Laura Plotts, College of Charleston
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Abstract
It has been established that L2 learners need to have effective skills to make, share and negotiate meaning in different digital modes (visual, audio, and textual) to be able to create, collaborate, and communicate in an L2. As college students and future graduates, they are expected to acquire these skills and be multilingual digital literates. Therefore, it is not uncommon nowadays to have digital learners in charge of their language learning process with the assistance of their instructors as guides and facilitators (Durán-Cerda, 2010). Particularly, students in this course had to use multimodal digital literacy tools for the development of creativity, collaboration and communication (www.futurelab.org.uk) in Spanish as an L2.
The poster presentation will describe an upper-level, distance education Spanish course named “Service Learning: Hispanics in the United States”; intended student audience; course objectives including the further development of online digital literacies in Spanish as an L2; types of materials and delivery format as a distance education course; and examples of digital tools used to further develop interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational modes of communication proposed by ACTFL (2012). One of the tools used for this purpose was VoiceThread, a cloud application that allows one to create, share, comment, and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio files, and videos. For instance, students were able to create (individually or in group) both visual and auditory narratives using images, text, video and audio, and later share those with the instructor and their peers using interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational modes of communication.
Presenters
Silvia Rodriguez Sabater
Associate Professor of Spanish
College of Charleston
Laura Plotts
Instructional Technologist
College of Charleston
plottsl@cofc.edu