Andrew Reinhard's Blog (78)

On June 23, 2007, I had the opportunity to be one of nine American delegates (and sole Classicist) to the first annual Second Life Language Teaching Colloquium (SLanguages 2007). Sponsored by the

Consultants-E, a UK-based eLearning company, the conference was held on the

Second Life island of

EduNation. …





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One of Dr. Jayni Reinhard's (University of Wisconsin - Parkside) favorite language-learning activities as a grad student at the University of Minnesota was reading Greek off of high-quality images of papyrus fragments. A group project introduced students to paleography and served as a much-needed and welcome reminder that the texts from ancient authors were not as neat and tidy as students might sometimes think. Poems were… Continue

For those of you who are interested in teaching yourself Latin, are homeschoolers, have several sections of Latin in one classroom at the same time and are wondering what to have your Latin I kids do while you translate Catullus 63 with your Latin IVs, or have always wanted your Ubuntu Linux box to talk back to you in Restored Classical Latin, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers has just released Artes Latinae v2.0. Dr. Waldo Sweet's program of Latin study has been updated with a new interface and can… Continue

A couple of our members who teach Latin mentioned to me that they are using Wimba Voice Tools to modernize the language lab component of their classes. While I am not intended this post to be a sales pitch, after reviewing the site and speaking to folks who have used Voice Tools for their classes, Wimba seems to be on the right track in getting modern technology into the hands of language teachers to facilitate the oral and aural… Continue

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet and chat with a 21-year-old Greek college student attending university in Athens. The trick was that we met on-line in Second Life. As some of you know, there are virtual environments here that reproduce real-world features (like Rome). In this case, we met in virtual Hellas, a reproduction of a modern Greek beachtown complete with seaside, cafes, ruins, shops, and more. If you have Second Life on your computer, click… Continue

Emily Silverman tuaght Latin at William Penn

Charter School, in Philadelphia, for the 2006-7 school year. One of her classes created a rather dynamic site on Wordpress focusing on Vergil's Aeneid with links to blogs of many of the personnae in the epic. Her current students are in love with the project, and past students wish they would have had a project like this when they were enrolled (how… Continue

While Latin does seem to get the lion's share of attention in both real and virtual worlds, it's important to note that many resources for the study of ancient Greek are freely available on-line. Below are links to PDF handouts for students and teachers of ancient Greek prepared for all levels of study:



The University of Edinburgh Department of Classics homepage has links to its individual Greek classes, the… Continue

Most educators who create podcasts usually create them in one of two formats: audio-only or video. While these can be useful tools for a short lesson on Catullus 64 or for diagramming the first two lines of Cicero's First Catalinarian, the podcasts are usually a single track and can, at times, stretch to an hour or more. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- far from it. We have a number of members here who confess to jamming to their favorite podcast while taking their morning… Continue

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As eClassics gets more members, many teachers have related some interesting stories on their experiences with technology in the Classics classroom. I thought I'd back things up a little bit and provide some definitions of technology that is currently out there and being used, for better or worse, by your Classics colleagues and other educators.…

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David Brin is a science fiction author and futurist (as in science instead of Boccioni). While usually spot-on in his predictions, in an interview in the 2007 special "Invisible Planet" issue of Discover, Brin states that one of his more "disappointing" forecasts is that we have not experienced any rapid, "big advances in computerized teaching" (p. 66). Whether Brin means computer-aided instruction or computer-led instruction is unclear, but still,…

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For those of you who subscribe to the Latinteach discussion list, you have been treated to real eLearning in action in a high school Latin classroom, specifically Latin 3 (AP Catullus). The teacher is Robert Patrick (aka Magister Patricius), and his blog, Carmina Catulli, is used by his students to reflect on the Catullus poems presented in class, not only on the grammar, but going deeper into the…

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It happens to a lot of North Americans. We visit the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, buy a DVD, and return home, pop it in the player for the ancient Greek class on Culture Friday and get an error message. Or, we purchase a hard-to-find Classics-themed DVD on-line from Europe and receive it only to discover that while the Region 2 DVD plays through our computers, it does not play in our Region 1 DVD player hooked up to telly. You've bought the DVD from a legitimate source…

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YouTube. You've probably noticed that there are always a couple of Classics-themed YouTube videos here to entertain you before you dig into the real meat of eLearning and language study. That's a fundamental issue with video hosting sites: quick bites of entertainment, advertising for bands, an archive for classic children's programming. Sites like YouTube are, however, also being used to host brief, educational how-to videos. Take for example a search…

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After a disappointing day yesterday of coming up nearly empty in search of electronic tools for Classicists (and Medievalists and their version of "Latin" ;) ), I spent the bulk of today talking to teachers and students, assessing what technology, if any, they were using for both class and research. I did come up with a few good leads and noticed a few trends. Overhead data projectors with their attendant PowerPoint presentations have surpassed the two-fisted slide projection MWF rituals in…

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After the first full day at Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, I am both amazed and befuddled. I took a few breaks from selling books to walk around the exhibition hall to talk to other people who were selling books. Of the dozens of vendors exhibiting at North America's largest conference on Medieval studies, only three had anything to do with technology: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers with its Artes Latinae self-teaching Latin software,…

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I spent a lot of time at the recent CAMWS conference speaking with anyone who would listen about potential applications of technology for learning ancient languages. While I did expect the older crowd to recoil in horror at the mention of computers and the younger crowd to fully embrace all things technical, I was pleasantly surprised that my stereotypes were wrong, even if they were somewhat right during the period of their genesis.

Instead, I found that the line was drawn between…

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Thanks for your interest in eLearning and the Classics. You've gotten this far (so THIS is the Internet, eh?), but now it's time to share your thoughts, ideas, stories (good or bad) on technology in the Classics classroom. This blog will be updated three times a week (more or less) with eLearning news and links that you can start implementing into your classes right away.



The attendant Forum (on the left) is open to anyone who wishes to start a topic or contribute to an active…

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