We had our first training session for Irina’s students of Spanish, with Xerte yesterday and it went very well. Irina and I were ably assisted by Alex Furr, from the University of Southampton’s Centre for Innovation in Technology and Education (CITE), who kicked off the session by talking through how to use Xerte and describing some aspects of the functionality of the tool.
I went on to explain the outline of the project and demo’d a Xerte learning object which I had made relating to a basic point in Spanish grammar…since I don’t know Spanish, it was a strange mixture of, well, Spanglish! I’ve promised the group I’ll keep working on it and they can judge how my knowledge of Xerte and my knowledge of Spanish improves over time!
Once Alex had introduced everyone to Xerte, we had some time for a ‘hands-on’ experiment to see what Xerte could do – and I was really impressed by what everyone could produce within the space of 40 mins. The group found functions on Xerte that I didn’t know existed and several people commented on how simple Xerte was to use! It has made me really excited to see what we will all produce by the end of the project, and I think there are going to be some fantastic learning objects created for Spanish. The group already began seeking out new online resources in Spanish to support their experimentation with Xerte.
Some of the early comments from the group were very inspiring in relation to how Xerte suits the learning of languages, with one of the group commenting how suitable Xerte was for modern languages because of the multimedia aspects that can be combined and practiced on one space. I can’t wait to see how this idea plays out…
Inevitably, there were some technical gripes. Some of the group found aspects of Xerte unintuitive, e.g. having to choose ‘publish’ when actually you mean ‘save;’ having to work hard to find out how to publish and share your learning object; and especially, how to alter the font size on plain text docs. Additionally, the similarity of some functions led to some confusion and we talked about how each task type actually had a different purpose although on the surface it might appear the same. We also found that there were some glitches in the system…but logging out and back in seemed to sort things out…
I’ve asked the group to be ‘critical friends’ to Xerte and feed back their technical comments to me so I can push them on to the Xerte team.
Our next steps
- Start work on the learning objects which will be presented in week 7 (March 10th/11th). I will offer tech back up and support over the next 4 weeks both for the group and in 1-2-1 meetings
- Engage more students in Modern Languages with the project
Kate Borthwick