ACTFL Announces 2010 National Student Video Podcast Contest to Celebrate Discover Languages Month!

Entries must be received by
midnight (Eastern) December 20, 2009.

Get your students involved in celebrating, educating, and communicating the value of language learning!  This year the main focus of February as Discover Languages month will be encouraging students to reflect on the value of learning languages and the impact it has had on their lives.  They can express their views in a one-minute video and teachers can easily upload the video to enter their students in the contest.  Students over 18 years of age can enter on their own.  This contest is co-sponsored by Pearson Prentice Hall and ASC Direct.

www.ACTFLVideoContest.org 

MERLOT World Languages is proud to promote the ACTFL 2010 Student Video Podcast contest in its third year. We encourage language educators to give their students the opportunity to reflect on the importance of learning a new language while using 21st century technology.

MERLOT World Languages Classic Award Winner 2009

The Texas Language Technology Project is the 2009 MERLOT World Languages Classics Winner
For years, MERLOT World Languages has followed the work of the Texas Language Technology Center Project, an award-winning, FIPSE grant supported program at the University of Texas at Austin. The TLTC provides open access to high quality online instructional materials in foreign languages including Arabic, French, German, Italian, Persian, Portuguese and Spanish. The individual language web sites in the project are being built on the model of Français interactif, a complete first year French program online which has itself received a five star peer review from MERLOT. Français interactif was awarded 1st place in the University's 2004 IITAP competition and was given the National Endowment for the Humanities EDSITEment Best of Humanities on the Web award (2005). The principal TLTC Faculty developers are Carl Blyth, Karen Kelton and Nancy Guilloteau and the faculty team which includes many distinguished members,such as 2009 Dean's Fellow Orlando Kelm, technical team members and student evaluators. Other TLTC projects that have received five star reviews from MERLOT include Tex's French Grammar, Spanish Proficiency Exercises and Ta Falado. Additional individual TLTC projects peer reviews will appear in MERLOT shortly. Congratulations to the winners at UT Austin!!

Rutgers Multimedia Chinese Teaching System is the 2008 MERLOT World Languages Classics Winner

See Dr. Ching-I Tu talk about the Rutgers Multimedia Chinese Teaching System in this video.

RMTS is a system that enables students to practice reading, speaking and listening Chinese with comprehensive drills in grammar and vocabulary. User-friendly lessons present traditional and simplified Chinese characters and include English translations. Lessons also include vocabulary, grammar notes, sentence patterns and exercises, as well as audio of the entire text.

Project Director Dr.Ching-I Tu accepted the MERLOT Classics award from MERLOT Executive Director Dr. Gerard Hanley at the MERLOT International Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 8, 2008. Together with Assistant Project Director Dr. Holly Chen Tyson, Dr. Tu also presented a session on RMTS to an appreciative audience at the conference. MERLOT salutes the RMTS team for its contribution to the teaching and learning of Chinese online.

ACTFL Video Podcast Contest Winners in 2009

MERLOT World Languages is pleased to continue its promotion of the ACTFL Video Podcast Competition. Students in elementary, middle school, high school, colleges and universities submitted digital videos that described why language study was important to them personally. The contest was an official activity of Discover Languages Month and part of the ongoing Discover Language campaign. The aim of Discover Languages is to keep the importance of speaking a second language on the minds of educators, students and all citizens.

MERLOT World Languages joined the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR), and sponsors Pearson Prentice Hall and ASC Direct to help plan this successful national Student Video Podcast contest in 2009. See the winners at the contest website.

CLEAR's Rich Internet Applications

Want to put the technology in student hands? CLEAR's Rich Internet Applications provides an easy to use tool for uploading digital video that is free for non-commercial use by educators. Putting the technology in the hands of tech savvy students creates excitement about using language outside the classroom. Video projects in the target language also make students focus more on pronunciation and the clear delivery of a message in a second language. As they practice their video scripts, they do so with a purpose that is not just about language study. In such a project, students are addressing the Communities standard of the Foreign Language Standards which calls for using the target language in real-world settings.

CLEAR's Guide to Hosting a World Languages Day

CLEAR shares its model for a World Languages Day in its Celebrating the World's Languages: A Guide to Creating a World Languages Day Event . The guide was co-authored by personnel from CLEAR at Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Minnesota. It is a practical step-by-step guide that goes from rationale to implementation of a World Languages Day.
This publication is offered free to educators as part of its service as a U.S. Department of Education Title VI Language Resource Center.