2011 CIBER Business Languages Conference, Teaching with Technology Workshop

by Ann Abbott


Orlando Kelm's workshops are legendary. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but I'm serious. And it's rightfully deserved.  I'm pretty savvy about technology, yet I learned about platforms I didn't know about, and Orlando gave very creative and inspiring examples about how to use these tools in the teaching of business languages.

You can see the information from his presentation in this particular post. Be sure to view the entire blog as well to learn more. It's a wonderful example of how to effectively use a blog as your course website, how to teach business cultures, and it contains very useful links and posts.

Specifically, I learned about polleverywhere.com and posterous.com. We did some very fun activities with polleverywhere during the session. Students can text or tweet their responses as well as via the website. It was fun to see the graphs change in real time as people sent in their responses. This could be used in class to give a quiz, to solicit opinions, to probe students' background knowledge and more. You can use the free version if no more than 30 people respond to the poll, and Orlando sometimes has students create the poll themselves, not just answer ones that he has written.  Orlando uses posterous.com to allow his students to upload their videos to his YouTube channel.

Two Google projects were mentioned--Google Goggles and the Google Art Project. I will have to look into them more on my own.

This is a very quick summary, in part because nothing I can write can do justice to Orlando's presentation style, his wonderful examples and the back and forth with the audience members. I encourage everyone to explores his blogs.

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