Pierre Cintas, associate professor of French, is creating new educational technology modules during a faculty fellowship with Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), a unit of Information Technology Services (ITS). The fellowship will continue through the spring 2007 semester.
|
The program helps both Cintas and TLT meet educational goals. Cintas receives assistance from TLT pedagogical technology experts on projects designed to enhance his courses. It is an opportunity for TLT to work closely with faculty and learn more about their technology needs.
"This is an ideal way for us to develop relationships with faculty," John Harwood, senior director of TLT, said. "Along with developing some outstanding projects, faculty can give us some exceptionally candid feedback about what works and what doesn't. This is very helpful in developing effective educational technology programs and resources for Penn State faculty."
Cintas and TLT are working on several innovative projects during his time as faculty fellow. His first project is to develop interactive online materials designed to teach Elementary and Intermediate French. Students will have these learning tools available to them at anytime. Students will be able to progress at their own speed, choosing the material that is most relevant to what they need to learn in an easy-to-navigate, interactive format.
The online materials will include exercises dealing with sentence structure, verb forms, verb conjugations, pronouns, and adverbs. The format consists of fill-in-the-blank questions, and wrong answers are flagged so students can go back to offer the correct one.
The second project is a module that focuses on French literature, including observation, comprehension, and reflection exercises. The module is designed for more advanced students, such as those in French 201 and 202. In this module, students read a short literary excerpt in French, accompanied by two vocabulary lists that increase in difficulty as the student progresses through it. The module asks students questions in French that are designed to help them appreciate the relationship between vocabulary, syntax, and meaning.
The questions will be delivered in ANGEL via a self-check quiz or a Word document for students to post in a dropbox. The goals of the module include exposing students to French language literature, extending knowledge of French vocabulary and sentence structure, and learning basic literary analysis. In addition, French speakers will record some of the text in the module to give student s additional practice listening to French.
While the previous two projects are for Penn State students, Cintas and TLT are working on a French etymology word game that will be available worldwide via the Internet. The game will be a French version of the challenging online English word origin and definition game Etymologic, known as the toughest word game on the Internet (http://etymologic.com/).
The game will feature ten random questions pulled from a bank of questions written by Cintas and other French instructors. As of mid-October, the database already had sixty questions. To write each question, Cintas relies on the online French dictionary Le Trésor de la Langue Française, as well as other online sources such as Wiktionnaire and the French word origin resource Dizionario Etymologico Online. Each question describes a French word and gives four possible etymologies. The user selects one, and then finds out if they are right or wrong. If wrong, the player receives the correct answer. If correct, the player receives one point. This game will allow students to discover the often-surprising origins of French words and provide more exposure to French vocabulary and its evolution.
Game players can propose new questions via a form that will be forwarded to Cintas and a review board to determine if the question should be added, and if so, whether it needs any modification. "New questions from other francophone parties anywhere in the world will be gladly considered," Cintas said. "They will enrich the database."
Cintas is no stranger to pedagogical technology. Along with his twenty-eight years of teaching experience at Penn State, he worked with Education Technology Services, a unit of ITS, on an interactive teaching module called "Elements of French Grammar" (EFG). The project, completed in the early 1990s, had tutorials and testing components, and featured more than 1,100 questions on aspects of the French language.
While there is no formal process for selecting TLT faculty fellows, Cintas' experience with the EFG project made him a natural to work with TLT. "EFG was a successful project and was used until spring 2006. It really made me aware of how technology can improve learning," Cintas said. "Plus, my relationship with the ETS people during the early 1990s was very positive. Based on that, I thought working with TLT would be an excellent experience and allow me to offer my future students some wonderful learning moments thanks to technology."
