Wimba

Stacey Powell of Auburn University is an expert when it comes to using technology to teach languages online.  She and her colleagues at Auburn have been using Wimba for several years and have many innovative ideas to share, as Wimba Voice plays a major role in her Foreign Language classes and Auburn instructors have developed many unique, creative activities using Voice Boards to teach everything from Spanish and French to Italian and Russian.

Feel free to drop Stacey an email if you ever want some tips and tricks.

Hello - I am an ESL instructor at UC Davis (near Sacramento, Calif.) and would like to find out how to use Wimba’s apps. to make my ESL courses more dynamic for my students. Any tips would be appreciated. We are fairly limited in our resources here. It doesn’t make much sense, but in my “unit” we don’t have Blackboard, access to Moodle, or really any other class software. I use pbwiki and some Google apps. Teach me. Thanks.

My favorite example of an ESL course using Wimba apps comes from the University of Pennsylvania.  One instructor puts travel-themed TV and movie clips from YouTube into the Wimba Voice Presentation tool (which is a Wimba Voice board adjacent to a webpage).  In one lesson her students watched an airport scene from an episode of Friends in order to hear English travel terms like, ‘delay,’’ bump up,’ and ‘first class.’ And in another lesson her students watched a clip from Home Alone where a family races through an airport.  It gives her students a fun and practical way to practice speaking.  The instructor thinks it takes vocabulary out of the classroom and gives her students a real-life context in which to use it.

VERY INTERESTING. PLEASE SHARE TIPS ON TRAINING USING WIMBA

One particularly good training story comes from the University of Soutnern Mississippi where Amy Thornton holds numerous seminars to train faculty.  She says that assessing them afterwards is very important.  Feel free to look her up and ask her for more details.
Matt

I am using Wimba to teach Latin and English composition.  I use a tablet.  I can use the AppShare and write and speak to students at the same time.  I’ve been using this for over a year now.  It is a marvelous tool by which to teach language and composition.  My students don’t know how they would live without it now.  I teach primarily online.  Wimba has allowed us to build communities and relationships that last well beyond the constraints of a semester.

I’m from Auburn University. It’s good that I saw forum like this.
I am new to Wimba.  So far so good. Thanks

Simulation pret