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Hello, Teachers:

While we don’t cover daily news, we’re following the COVID-19 updates very closely. In the meantime, we want to do our part to help the situation get better. This is now a pandemic with direct repercussions for classroom teaching and learning. Many of us will be teaching remotely for the remainder of the term. Big changes, lots of transitions. But it’s not insurmountable.

Here at Radio Ambulante we have been telecommuting for years. I cannot think of one time when the entire team was in the same physical space. Using tools like Google Drive, Zoom, Trello and Slack are normal in our daily workflow… but we know that is not the case for everyone.

This special edition of the newsletter hopes to help with that transition. We are including many useful articles about best practices for teaching online and working from home. Changing the way we teach takes time and energy away from materials prep. Knowing this, we are creating a new teaching materials repository with the aim of sharing materials each of us has created for using Radio Ambulante in the classroom.

Finally, our featured teacher Shelly Jarrett Bromberg (MiamiU-Ohio) shares how she changed a lesson plan meant for the classroom to one that could be distributed online and via her school’s learning management system (LMS).

Stay safe and happy reading!
In this issue:
  • Recommendations for how to work from home and not (entirely) lose your mind
  • Pandemic prepping and language teaching (IALLT)
  • Announcing the Teaching with Radio Ambulante Materials Repository!
  • Featured episode and how to use it in the classroom
  • Best practices showcase: Shelly Jarrett  Bromberg
Suddenly remote? Here's a toolkit
Whether you already have some experience teaching remotely, or you are just starting to adapt to this dynamic, here are some resources to expand your toolkit:

📰   To read:

▶  Going on line in a Hurry: What to Do and Where to Start, an article by The Chronicle of Higher Education
▶  How to Be a Better Online Teacher, also by The Chronicle of Higher Education
▶  How to Work From Home Without Losing Your Mind, an article by WIRED.
▶  7 Best Practices for COVID-19-Necessitated Online Meetings, an article by Inside Higher Ed

📺  To watch:

▶  IALLT webinar (pre recorded): This webinar features several academic language technologists who support online language teaching at their institutions.

📋  To fill out:

▶  'Teaching with Radio Ambulante' Materials Repository: We're creating a general repository with relevant resources to use Radio Ambulante in your courses. We're already uploading some materials ourselves, and we would like to invite all teachers to share their teaching materials (using Creative Commons Licenses, such as CC BY-NC 4.0) with others through this Google Form.
Please be sure to include your name on your materials, as well as your creative commons license number. We will then organize all the resources into individual folders and share a link so anyone in the community can access them.

🛠️  To use:

▶  Tools for Remote Collaboration, a list we've put together at Radio Ambulante to help get you started. If you'd like to add anything else to the list, please do so.
▶  Tool Kit for Online Instructors, a complete guide by Prof. Rick Reis (Stanford University)
▶  Annotate Videos and Images With These Free Tools, a list by Practical Ed Tech
Community resources
We understand how important it is to build your own toolbox to work remotely, and if 100+ weekly newsletters with recommendations have taught us something is that collective intelligence goes a long way. While we continue to follow updates on the COVID-19 pandemic, we're opening this form to crowdsource useful resources that can help our community cope with this transition to teaching and learning remotely.

We've already added a few ourselves, so we now invite you to complete the form below and share something, too. It can be anything from a lesson plan to a delicious recipe for those days when you're glued to your desk.
I want to share something
▶ All the submissions will be available right here, we recommend you bookmark this for easy access in the future.
About social distancing...
By now you have probably read or talked a lot about social distancing and its consequences on our psyche. This week we asked ourselves: how might we maintain and nurture our social bonds during these times of uncertainty and isolation? And this made us think about Los cassettes del exilio and how the Maxwell family tried to mitigate an overwhelming distance. Dennis Maxwell was helping his brother move to a new place in Santiago, Chile, when they stumbled upon their childhood. They found a box of old cassettes, and on them, a record of their father’s exile, the family’s efforts to stay together, and vivid evidence of how far a parent can go to give his children hope.

If you're looking for content to talk with your students about creative ways to mitigate the negative effects of social distancing, this could be a good fit. And thanks to the generosity and courage of our community during the Summer Hackathon, we also have a versatile lesson plan for this episode.
To explore the different teaching materials we created, please click the button below:
Explore lesson plan
And if you're looking for materials to talk about racial fears, anxieties and discriminatory discourse in the news coverage and social conversations about COVID-19, check out this comprehensive guide started by Jason Oliver Chang, Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Best practices showcase
Shelly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Miami University of Ohio.  She had to “flip” a face to face class to online in anticipation of school being closed because of COVID-19.  Her school uses a learning management system (LMS) called Canvas.  What she describes and the exercises she is sharing for the episode Narco Tours could be used in any online environment.

Tell us about the course you are teaching online:
I first developed these materials for an intermediate face to face course, where I emphasized learning how to listen effectively. When I had to design an intermediate online course, I thought this activity might work. 

How did you modify the exercise to fit an online format?
I added more scaffolding and instructions. I decided to use English for the instructions for clarity.

What sorts of assignments did you create?
I created a series of assignments:  a guided listening exercise, a “guía de anticipación” for pre and post listening, a series of questions for small group conversations, and a free writing assignment.
To help students to interact with the material, each other and with me, I used the following tools in the LMS:

💻  Embedded links: to direct students to the Radio Ambulante website and podcast
💻  The Discussion tool: I chose this asynchronous discussion board tool instead of synchronous chat (our synchronous tools were crashing due to high demand)
💻  Document upload: students submit their assignments via the LMS (vs email)

What was the response of your students?
They liked it, and it was challenging for them because in a podcast you cannot see who is speaking. You need to distinguish voices and listen carefully. I explained to my students that this is much like having to communicate via the phone, and therefore excellent practice.

What recommendations would you give others?
▶  Use the transcripts  that RA provides, at least initially. It helps the students contextualize what they hear.
▶  Allow your students to listen to the episode in segments.
▶  Think of Radio Ambulante as a way to build intercultural competencies and perspectives. Narco Tours showed the various and often conflicting perspectives about Pablo Escobar in Colombia, and was an excellent teaching tool in this regard.
 
Shelly wants to thank Ryan Baltrip and his E-Learning Team at Miami University for helping her make all of this possible. She has kindly shared these resources with us. (Thanks, Shelly!)

You can download them here. 👇
Download resources
Alternatively, you can download a PDF version right here.
Shelly shared a valuable lesson plan that emphasized learning how to listen effectively. To complement these exercises, we invite you to visit ClubesDeEscucha.com, where you will find question guides, word puzzles and coloring sheets designed to improve engagement during our Listening Clubs.
We all need more of this, don't we?
Thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, please share it with a friend. And if you have materials to share and/or you would like to be featured in future newsletters, please send me a note.

These are difficult times, but together we can support each other despite the distance. If you want to share ideas about what has brought you calm and wellness, please do it here.


Stay safe and hasta la próxima,

Barbara Sawhill
Spanish Language Education Coordinator
Radio Ambulante
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