HW "Three For All" PD Program

I've casually mentioned our "Three For All" program for professional development to a few colleagues from other schools, and based on the questions asked about it, I thought it may be worth sharing to a wider audience.

We'll be starting our 1:1 laptop program next year in 7th grade, before rolling it out to 7-9 and 7-12 in the next two years, and to better prepare our faculty and staff to use the devices effectively, we contemplated all varieties of PD plans. Our school structure makes it difficult to offer blocked time for join PD, leaving it instead for faculty to do on their own. With that in mind, we contemplated plans that used words like "require" and "mandate" to make the importance of PD work clear, but because that approach didn't really capture our school's philosophy toward PD, for which we believe in autonomy and choice, nothing seemed right.

Our MS Head of School finally decided on one he called "Three For All", which asks all faculty (not just 7th-grade teachers) to complete 3 PD projects by the start of the next academic year on Aug. 27. In March, he revealed the program to the rest of the faculty using a video we put on YouTube, rather than through an email (which was very well received!). A single PD project could include almost anything, including reading a book and writing a review, watching a webinar or taking an online course, participating in a Tweetchat, attending a workshop or #coffeecue meeting, visiting a school, or even going to a conference. And if the conference offers multiple workshops, it could well count for three PD credits itself. We've created a document of suggested activities to encourage collaborative participation, but there were very few restrictions on the types of activities.

Because we want faculty doing the kind of work that they're interested and invested it, we also gave the option of requesting specific 1:1 tutorials or departmental workshops. If a teacher gave a workshop for others, that would count as a credit, since we want to encourage the formation of a support network within the school. But we also welcome departments to arrange for workshops led by experts they choose from outside the school in order to ensure that their PD time and work is valuable and most of all, to make it clear to our community that we support them in their "Three For All" activities.

PD work is recorded within a spreadsheet, and faculty are encouraged to share their work with the rest of the community on our faculty portal, where others can see what they've done and whether they found the project useful, while asking any questions about it.

Thus far, we all are quite happy with the results. In fact, in addition to the variety of work recorded, we've been pleasantly surprised at how many credits some faculty have already earned. By giving our community autonomy to select their own projects and trusting them to do the work responsibly, our level of participation is high. Moreover, more faculty are exchanging ideas with each other not only for "Three For All" opportunities but also for ideas to use in their classrooms next year. I'm still thinking through ways to facilitate face-to-face sharing (e.g. a "demo slam" or weekly coffee chats) and welcome any suggestions.

When we return to campus in the fall, our TIS team will lead an edcamp-like PD workshop, where we hope others will be willing to share what they learned over the summer. Most importantly, we hope that these sorts of discussions that the "Three For All" program has already sparked will continue to happen throughout next year and that we will continue to build a strong network of experts from within our faculty.

I welcome any questions or comments on the program, and I'm also curious to learn of other approaches to PD that other schools have found successful.

Latin III Exam Experiment

In my Latin III course, where we abandon the traditional textbooks in favor of a reading approach to cover advanced grammar, I ask students to keep an "Running Latin Commentary" (RLC) for all the work that we do together. This RLC is used to record notes on grammar, vocab., style, etc., as we move through our various texts. The "close reading" skills take a while to build, and it's proven challenging to organize too, leaving the paper RLCs not as useful as I think they should be.

With that, I decided to have students keep their RLC notes in a blog, rather than on paper. I'll admit that it took a huge leap of faith to ask 9th graders to keep a blog for the entire year, without having any idea of what to expect. But as I now reflect back on our year, the blog RLC was a huge success, and I'm both very pleased and quite amazed at the quality of work that they've done with their blogs. I sincerely hope that they continue using them, as they move through the cursus honorum of Latin courses.

Over the course of the year, I commented on their posts to help them look at the details that I wanted them to see. But I also gave them total creative control to add any other interesting ideas that occurred to them through their reading. I also encouraged them to read and comment each other's blogs to share ideas. On certain occasions, I gave them other prompts for posts, e.g. reading the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite for comparison with Venus in Cupid and Psyche and in the Aeneid, or comparing the heroic qualities of Aeneas to Tony Stark in Iron Man 3. In other words, the kinds of questions that Classicists like to ask.

As we approached today's final exam, we devoted the last few weeks of the year to reading Cicero's Pro Archia without fussing with grammatical detail to the same degree that we did at the beginning of the year; we just read for fun. In doing so, I saw more examples of deeper understanding of both the Latin language and literature that I'd hitherto seen, and I was very impressed at their ability to understand how prose and poetry differ. One of the biggest and most surprising outcomes of the blog experiment was an overall "looser" approach toward reading Latin.

Next year, I want to encourage more reading and commenting from the outset, and I also want to give more "freeblogging" opportunities to allow them to start making connections sooner and work through ideas that we could follow over the course of the year. And now that we'll have internet connectivity in all our classrooms, I'll even allow them to use their own RLCs on sight quizzes.

In the past, I used to give my Latin III students a final exam with a variety of parts: verb synopsis, vocab., seen reading, some sight reading, and some composition. Frankly, it was a bit of a bear and ultimately, I fear, not the best thing we could have done to cap our year of hard work. I believe that final exams should only help students not hurt them. This year, therefore, given our greater emphasis on sight-reading, I opted for solely sight passages on the final exam: one prose and one poetry passage, for which students could use a dictionary. When wi-fi access will be available everywhere in the school next year, I'll let them use their RLCs too.

It's typically the case that 9th graders take final exams, only to leave and never see them again. Given the new approach to the course we took this year, I thought that the best way to give us closure and a sense of accomplishment would be to grade the exams together. So, right after the exam, I collected those who were available, and I let students grade their own work, while we discussed the passages in detail. I'll catch up on Monday with the others who couldn't stay.

A few weeks earlier, I gave them a sight quiz that they found more difficult that I expected. Rather than grade and return it, I graded a photocopy (without telling them!) and in class handed back the original, which we graded together in the same grading style I use (assigning 1 point per word, with half for meaning and half for function). Once finished, we compared their own evaluation to mine. To our collective surprise, they all graded more harshly that I do, and I think they learned more from attentively looking at their own work than by reading my comments, especially on something they found difficult.

We took a similar approach toward grading their final exams, and in short, they were all quite happy with the outcome. Because there was no set corpus or any other set "study guide" or vocabulary to learn for the exam,, they just read Latin for the sake of Latin, and they even found both the review and the exam to be fun! In the end, they worked hard this year, and I hope that they'll leave campus this afternoon not only knowing their grade, but, much more importantly, knowing what they've accomplished.

I'm very pleased with these experiments, and I'm eager to continue to develop them next year. It'd be fantastic if we could find other Latin III classes interested in similar blog projects so we could share our work. Any interest?

Caveat Venditor: Pink's To Sell Is Human

I loved Daniel Pink's Drive and found it extremely relevant to many of problems confronting education (cf. some of my thoughts on it), so when +Chris Long suggested his newest book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others for a #CAedchat summer read, I eagerly jumped right on it.

In To Sell, Pink addresses the techniques that effective salesmen use, after making a compelling case that the majority of us today, especially those in academia, are indeed salesmen. Effective "sales" (in all senses of the word; I'll use it here very loosely) must incorporate attunement, buoyancy, and clarity, Pink argues, and I found his discussions around these three principles illuminating for the way we deal with each other when we're exchanging ideas and opinions.

Briefly, attunement is what's necessary to be a good listener, which I think is right up at the top of the list of valuable leadership skills to have. Additionally, the ability to take the perspective of all involved sides of a given exchange has shown to be more valuable than simply showing empathy (73). To be "buoyant" is, in part, to ask questions to make people think about an idea, rather than make statements, since questions can generate more intrinsic motivation for an idea (103). And clarity involves finding new problems, not solving old ones, and curating our information, not just accessing it (132).

Some other quick notes of interest with regard to teaching that caught my attention:

• When making a sales pitch, selling an experience is often more effective than the promise of material items (137).
• Making a partner look good (don't argue!), so that one doesn't feel the other is taking an advantage (198).
• The best sales are both "personal and purposeful" (210).

All of these features belong in the classroom: We should be selling the experience of education to students, rather than product like grades and stickers, and we should make them feel good about their experiences by allowing them to do interesting things with their learning (e.g. project-based learning, 20% time, etc.). Without personal investment and a clear purpose in learning, our "sales pitches", however well-intentioned, aren't likely to find as much success as we'd like.

Just as importantly, Pink's concepts of sales deserve application to administration and leadership. Next fall, I'm going to assume a joint TIS role with a few other colleagues, when we begin our 1:1 laptop program, and with To Sell in mind, I'm looking forward to paying closer attention to various behaviors in meetings, like perspective, mimicry (75ff.), positive emotions (108), optimism (111), and the different kinds of "pitches" (161ff.) that we use sell our ideas to others. With a little more attunement, buoyancy, and clarity, I'm confident we'll be better equipped to handle the problems we'll certainly face.

First and foremost, I'm going to make it a goal to be a better listener to both colleagues and students in all my dealings with them, with the hopes that we can make our interactions more personal. I'm also going to test out introducing important ideas by asking questions, while striving to make the purpose behind them clear, and I will try to teach my students how to ask better questions and find better problems to solve. I'm going to try to say "yes and..." with positivity (193) as much as possible, rather than "yes, but..." or even "no".

We'll have much more to say on To Sell later this summer in the #CAedchat book club discussion of it, which everyone is welcome to join.

A Shallow Collective?

As I begin my summer reading binge, I've been trying to balance my consumption of pro-technology materials to include anything that offers alternative and/or critical views of the new (e.g. tech.-focused) directions in education. Much like I've argued with questions of the value of foreign language, I think it's healthy to face and even embrace criticism, since it helps us to build a fuller understand of why we do certain things in certain ways through reflection, lest our ideas become dogmatic or myopic.

With that, I recently read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, followed immediately by Douglas Thomas and John Brown's A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, which seem to have been written for one another, despite having no apparent knowledge of the other book's existence (other than a single citation in New Culture without any explicit commentary on Shallows). It's proven quite interesting to read both books in succession, since in many respects they occupy entirely different ends of the technological spectrum and can thus be read as criticism of each other in the regard mentioned above.

Carr's Shallows, an "exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences" (cf. this video summary), gives a thought-provoking challenge to those who advocate technology. Carr's thesis is that the increased use and even dependence on the internet is affecting our attention, focus, and deep-thinking skills, and he presents a rather impressive collection of evidence in favor of the neurological consequences of certain technologies. Since finishing it a week ago, I've been thinking more about the broader applications of technology in education in light of his conclusions, and I'll outline just a few of the ideas that I've found interesting.

The first few chapters paint a 2000-year intellectual history of literary culture and the relation to the neuroplasticity of the brain, before he probes the internet's more recent effects on our thinking. One of his main criticisms is that more information necessarily allows less time to use it (Shallows 170), which then leads him to a short and subtle attack against Google's search engine (Shallows 72). And with less time spent in reflection and deep thought, we're unable to achieve a high level of memorization (Shallows 177), since the internet harms "working memory" (Shallows 193) and our attentiveness (Shallows 193-4).

Going even farther, Carr claims that the "offloading of memory" poses a threat to our very culture: "Outsource culture, and memory withers" (Shallows 197). We can even lose our "humanity" by relying so heavily on the internet (Shallows 207, 220), and we pay the price via alienation from each other (Shallows 211).  To my mind, Carr's claims at times tend toward the sensational, but that's not to say that they should be dismissed.

If The Shallows can be read as the critic's cautionary tale against the increased use of technology, then New Culture champions the proponent's response.  For what it's worth, New Culture doesn't privilege technology in its discussion or even discuss very many specific examples of tech. tools.  Instead, it's about, as the title makes clear, the "new culture of learning" that technology and the "fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century" (New Culture 17) has given us. Nearly everything that Carr offers as evidence for the dangers to thinking that internet brings to the brain finds a response in New Culture, and the two books couldn't present two more contrary views of the cultural value of technology.

The ideas in New Culture are centered around the "collective" environment, where "teachers no longer need to scramble to provide the latest up-to-date information to students because the students themselves are taking an active role in helping to create and mold it, particularly in areas of social information" (New Culture 52).  The new learning collective, then, is far from the solitary experience that Carr describes in The Shallows.

The "new culture of learning about the kind of tension that develops when students with an interest or passion that they want to explore are faced with a set of constraints that allow them to act only within given boundaries" (New Culture 81).  That is to say, taking advantage of the new media in education is more than simply unleashing students on internet; rather, there's a concerted attempt to incorporate innovation, combining structure with freedom (New Culture 48-9).

In the old mod model of education, students learn about world and their learning culture was precisely equal to their environment, within the "intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration" (Shallows 114); but in the new model, they learn with world (New Culture 38) and their culture emerges from environment (New Culture 37-8). The learning community is constructed such that its members are constantly referencing each other (New Culture 25) and learning from other's experiences (New Culture 29), with the result that they learn more than just "data":  their learning is "personal" and students are thus more invested (New Culture 31), in contrast to being "alienated" by technology (Shallows 211).

It's proven interesting to read these two books in succession, given the seemingly contradictory ideas they propose.  If I have any criticism of my own to levy against The Shallows, it's that Carr is too "traditional" in his outlook. He has overlooked the communal advantage that the internet and social media offer to today's students. Carr openly acknowledges that the world is shifting to the paradigm of digital culture and away from solitary reading and "intellectualism" (Shallows 108), but, aside from the argument against attention loss, it's not clear to me from his conclusions why such a shift can only have negative consequences.

I'm not one to dismiss intellectualism, but I also don't think that the world needs more solitary intellectuals right now. Thomas and Brown claim that "[a]lmost every difficult issue we face today is a collective, rather than a personal, problem" (New Culture 59), and it seems that these sorts of problems that we face and will continue to face can only be effectively addressed through collaboration.

While Carr laments the "outsourcing" of memorization (Shallows 181), Thomas and Brown applaud the shift away from it (New Culture 43). Digital culture allows students to ask more inquiry-based questions like "what are the things that we don't know and what questions can we ask about them?" (New Culture 83), where answers serve as starting points for other questions. I couldn't help but think of Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment, in which he gave kids in India access to the internet and watched as they collectively taught themselves how to use it. These kids look like anything but automatons who have been "numbed" from overexposure to the internet.

Carr's critical attitude toward Google is patently clear (Shallows 172), as are his beliefs about the price we pay for digitizing the world's libraries.  Thomas and Brown, on the other hand, offer a real-world example whereby Google was used by a neophyte coder to learn from his mistakes by using Google to find solutions and improve his work in the process (New Culture 26).

Though Carr argues that dependence on the internet leads one to lose identity by viewing it as an extension of themselves (Shallows 219), Thomas and Brown believe that digital culture via "collective indwelling" actually helps to create identity by giving students the opportunity to question their relationship with others through "hanging out" (New Culture 101) and by giving themselves more personal agency through "messing around" (New Culture 103). Most of all, "[g]eeking out provides an experiential, embodied sense of learning withing a rich social context of peer interaction, feedback, and knowledge construction enabled by a technological infrastructure that promotes 'intense, autonomous, interest driven' learning" (New Culture 104).  9-year-old Sam illustrated the example of the "new culture" well, in that he is able to take advantage of collective learning not only to improve his knowledge of programming, but to improve his overall understanding of citizenship (New Culture 20-21) — an understated but crucially important result of an effective collective.

In the end, while I disagree some of Carr's conclusions in favor of the ideas in New Culture, he does an excellent job of collecting various studies on brain development and behavior to show how technology can affect our brains. For instance, it's clear that we learn much worse when distracted, as has been shown through various experiments (cf. especially Shallows 133). Carr's challenges to the growing importance of technology allows us to reflect on the purpose behind our choices. Whether beginning a 1;1 program, moving students to an LMS, or even just doing digital media projects, we should be clear about our goals, and we should never use technology simply to use technology. It's up to educators to craft the right kind of collective environment for our students so we don't end up too shallow or too deep.

If interested in the intersection of pedagogy and education, I suggest reading both of these fantastic books.  The #CAedchat summer book club will hold Twitter discussions on each of them over the next few months, where I'll be eagerly looking forward to continuing the discussion about these ideas.

On the History of Latin and Yoga

While in graduate school, the topic of "active" Latin (i.e. using spoken Latin in various ways) rarely came up, if at all, so it was something of a surprise to find so many proponents of it at the high school level.  In the various fora devoted to Latin discussions, it thus seems to be the case that every few months, a questions is asked about the linguistic status of the language by those who advocate its active use.  Namely, is Latin really a dead language?  It's typically asked, as I see it, with the expectation that the answer will be "no", given the wide breadth that the language and culture have in the modern world.

Image from The Guardian

Based on my training in Latin historical linguistics, however, I'm compelled to say that Latin is dead.  As far as we can tell, the Latin of Cicero and Caesar may have been no longer intelligible by as early as 500 CE, based on the testimony of texts like the Reichenau Glosses.  Sure, Latin evolved into the Romance languages and can be considered to be alive in their guise; but they are very different languages with different cultures.  Latin effectively died when its community of native speakers disappeared, since without them, there was no longer a full picture with which to reconstruct it.  Even though it continued to be used as a written language and even resuscitated orally for specific purposes (i.e. in the the form of Ecclesiastical Latin), Latin as an active linguistic entity has died.  From any objective perspective all claims to the contrary fail to stand up to scrutiny.

Without fail, declaring that Latin is objectively dead in these discussions incites vigorous attacks by those who dispute that it's dead, based on its active use.  Some have even alleged that dedicated oral Latin practice can lead to fluency at the proficiency level of native speaker, which is simply impossible.  I'm glad that there's so much enthusiasm for Latin around the world and that people defend their beliefs about it so vehemently, but I just don't think we can justify calling it a living language.  More importantly, I don't think that the death of Latin has to imply the death of active Latin today, which is the assumption that some have made.  All told, that Latin is dead doesn't need to be a negative thing at all.

To the contrary, oral Latin is gaining in popularity, and there are several active communities and enrichment opportunities with glowing reputations for speaking Latin actively.  In fact, one of my own students has participated at the Getty Villa's Academia Aestiva Latina program for two consecutive summers and hasn't a single negative word to say about the experience.  Approaching Latin pedagogy with more active principles in mind may actually lead to better experiences learning it, too.  We just need to divorce subjective feelings about what we do with Latin from the objective facts of its linguistic history.

Over spring break, I had a chance to catch up on reading.  In particular, I began +Carol Horton Yoga Ph.D, in which she analyzes the origins and transformation of yoga into what it is for many yogis today.  When she began her practice, she asked herself if the stories about yoga's supposedly 5000-year ancestry were true.  Many yoga teachers maintain its age to be true, and one teacher interviewed for the Enlighten Up! documentary even supposed that kundalini yoga can be traced back 40,000 years!  (For comparison, we generally believe that Proto-Indo-European was spoken as a linguistic entity sometime between 5000 and 4000 BCE.)  Horton shows us how the history of yoga has been homogenized, with very little ancient tradition to be found within the walls of modern studios, and more and more yogis are now coming understanding yoga as we know it is a very modern phenomenon.

But in her brilliant chapter on the duality of yoga, Horton doesn't dismiss its history as false and therefore useless.  Instead, she rather convincingly argues the need for a connection between the present and the past.  Although lacking a clear historical connection to India's ancient traditions, the difference from yoga's perceived history is valuable, in that "[b]reaking out of the box of our own cultural conditioning expands our sense of what's possible" (34).  Horton continues on the same page to say that "the more we use yoga to experience something deeper than our everyday consciousness, the more we're grounded in a sense that something significant connects human experience across the chasm of time and place".  Upon reading this a few nights ago, I was instantly reminded of the discussions about the linguistic lineage of Latin that I've been consistently returning to over past five years.  It would appear, then, that Latin and yoga share very similar histories, and I've found it very productive to compare my own experiences with the two.

When looking at Classical culture, we've also done a great job in homogenizing the past.  In the vast majority if historical depictions, Roman buildings look the same, the military looks the same, the elite are always the same gluttons, and most of all the Latin language is static and rigid.  Latin texts range from perhaps the 7th c. BCE to well into the middle of the 1st millennium CE, but we often take a myopic view of them within this span.  Classicists don't actually believe that this picture of ancient Rome is accurate, but in the same way that the ancient tradition of yoga is used as a foil for modern practice, according to Horton, active Latin can only thrive on maintaining a connection between the language we study today and the language that the Romans used 2000 years ago.

Because it's a dead language, there are several different pedagogical methods to approach teaching Latin, unlike what is done in modern language classrooms.  Some programs aim to read literature, while others teach students to speak Latin, and more programs are breaking away from the traditional mold, as far as I can tell.  I don't believe that Latin should only be taught actively, though, or that teachers necessarily need to adopt active methodologies, despite several claims assertions along these lines. Our program is relatively traditional in our overall approach, but we're also quite proud of it, since our students love it.  The unifying feature that makes Latin programs strong is the communal bond created in classes, when students believe they are part of something special and unique, much like what makes yoga communities strong.  This is certainly a driving force behind the oral Latin communities, I think, but in my experience a strong community can be built in a number of ways.

Image from VRoma

Next year, I've volunteered to teach Latin IA to the 7th grade, who will be the first at our school to begin a 1:1 laptop program.  I've never taught 7th grade before, but I'm excited to have the opportunity to build a communal foundation with new Latin students, who will hopefully continue through our program to Latin Lit. Honors and even take Greek.  Pounding grammar at this age is not the right thing to do, so I'm working toward other classroom activities, and I'm looking forward to continuing our department's use of technology in the classroom.  This is a large driving force behind the start of #latinlangchat, a Twitter chat devoted to Latin pedagogy, where I'm looking forward to meet other Latin teachers with great ideas about how to continue to build strong programs.  To my mind, the most important thing to do at this level is to foster engagement in whatever way it can be done, and I don't believe that there's only one correct way to accomplish this.

In sum, Horton supposes that she "can't help but feel that we're cheating ourselves out of something potentially valuable when we blithely assume that yoga's past was essentially the same as its present" (29), and this is essentially how I feel about Latin pedagogy and the more active uses of it.  Roman Latin is dead, and on account of this, there are certain things that we'll simply never know about it.  With only textual evidence available to us, mostly literary texts at that, no one will ever be "fluent" in Latin again.  It's important to me to acknowledge this and teach it to students, given that there's value in understanding what we're able do with Latin linguistically.  Our experiences with it, even if we encourage oral Latin, will always differ from what we read in original texts.  That knowledge and understanding, rather then serving as a detriment, can actually help us to build purpose and craft goals for our program.  And though we'll never create a community of active speakers in the same way that our Chinese, French, and Spanish programs can, we can nonetheless still build a strong, engaged communities and teach our students to enjoy learning Latin, while giving them the tools to continue their exploration of it subsequently, whether we're interested in reading ancient texts, conversing with each other in Latin, or doing some combination of both.

#latinlangchat Twitter Chat

I've had a great time participating in Twitter chats like "CAedchat", with hashtag #caedchat, which happens Sunday evenings at 8pm PST and provides a forum for CA teachers to discuss current topics in education and pedagogy.  As far as I know, there exists no current live chat devoted to Latin and the ancient world, and so capitalizing on the popularity of Twitter chats like this one (cf. this list for more), I'd like to start one.  It seems to me that we Latin teachers don't talk shop with enough frequency, and this could be a great way for us to build community (even Pompeii had social networks, after all!).

Latin graffiti from Pompeii

Given that the hashtag #latinlangchat is already in use by some Latin teachers, it makes sense to continue using it for this purpose.  I've created the #latinlangchat calendar that I'll use to plan our discussions, and I welcome help in any capacity, including co-moderators.  Though we're tagging our discussion with #latinlangchat, it is open to those who teach Greek, ancient history, and any other related fields.  Everyone should feel free to participate as much or as little as desired.

Let's have our first hour-long chat on Tuesday, 4/9 at 6pm PST and talk about the promotion of Latin programs.  How do we convince students to take Latin and maintain our program strength?  Is retention an problem, and if so, why?  Depending on how it goes, we can reconvene every other week at 6pm.

We'll follow the usual chat format and introduce ourselves, before jumping into questions labeled "Q1", "Q2", etc.  For convenience, answers should begin "A1", "A2", etc.  For chats of this sort on Twitter, it is usually suggested that tweetchat.com (vel sim.), which has worked very well for me, be used to monitor the discussion.  Chat digests will be kept using Storify.

Disclaimer:  I am in my fifth year teaching Latin at a middle school in Los Angeles and will be implementing a 1:1 laptop program for our 7th graders next fall.  I'm consequently very interested in discussing the incorporation of technology into our program.  I will again teach our 9th-grade Latin I course, designed for students new to the school or students taking a second language.  Traditionally, we have used the Oxford Latin Course for both the Latin IA-IB-II progression and this accelerated course, but I don't like its pacing for Latin I and will try Wheelock instead next year.  Finally, I teach Latin III to advanced 9th graders, using a reading-based approach that departs from the Oxford texts.  We begin with Balme and Morewood's Cupid and Psyche text, before moving on to one of the Focus Aeneid commentaries, in addition to other supplementary readings.  I am thus interested in discussing textbook choices and other resources for intermediate Latin students.  Based on my own experiences, I'll offer some of tentative ideas for discussion here, but I'd love to know what concerns others have:

• Building a Latin program
• JCL club culture 
• Latin and technology
• Textbooks and digital resources
• The AP Latin curriculum
• Latin-specific professional development opportunities

I can be found at @mosspike on Twitter, and our JCL club lives on at @hwjcl.  I'm looking forward to our first #latinlangchat next week!

Chromebooks and Word Processing

I finally picked up a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook, which I've had my eye on since I had the chance to work with one at the Boulder GAFE Summit last August (cf. my notes taken on a Chromebook).  I'm a big fan of Google Apps and have transitioned the majority of my work into my Drive account, so it's certainly a sensible purchase.  Additionally, my Mac is on its last leg, and the school-provided laptop is much too big for travel, and because I find using an iPad tedious for conferencing, the Chromebook seems like a great choice for a portable yet functional device while on the road.  After playing on it for a few hours, I'm very happy with the purchase.  Some quick observations:

• The Spotify extension didn't initially work, but after going through Facebook, it now opens the player.  The web player still in demo and doesn't offer full functionality.
• The trackpad is a little clunky, but I like the keyboard.
• The screen resolution is fine.
• The sound is surprisingly loud, even if somewhat muddled at high volumes, and the camera is respectable.

As our school moves toward a 1:1 laptop program beginning next fall, I've been working to keep the Chromebook in the picture as a viable laptop choice, and I've pushed toward as many web-based applications as possible to obviate the need for students to purchase expensive software that they would rarely use (I could easily see these software lists getting out of hand).  While web-based versions of most of the tools that students rely on are now available, however, there's still a dependence on Microsoft Office for all of our word-processing tasks.

I'm positive that I'll get quite a lot of use from the Chromebook, but one of my biggest issues in using it with students is the limited utility of fonts within Drive. Classics and linguistics consistently rely on specialized fonts for written work, and while Google Docs support nearly everything that we need, it is extremely tedious to generate non-standard characters easily within a document.  Consequently, I have two questions that I need to answer by August, before Drive can become a viable primary word-processing tool and the Chromebook can be a legitimate "BYOL" device for what I want to do in my Latin classes.

My Latin classes have found Drive useful (especially Docs and Spreadsheets), but we haven't yet used it to its full potential.  The default Chrome language can be set to Spanish, French, etc., with all diacritical characters readily available, and so modern language teachers should have little issues with writing the target languages.  But there's no "Latin" keyboard that offers the capability to write a long vowel with a "macron" over it, e.g. writing a verb like dūxērunt "they lead" (pf.).  When our students are doing written work on the computer, I want them to have the capability of marking vowel length without fuss, rather than having to insert a special character manually or type the Unicode character for each one, e.g. U+0113 for ē.

My question:  is there a way to create shortcut keys to type long vowels?  In Word, once can easily create a custom shortcut key, but because shortcuts are tied to browser function in web-based text editors, I'm not sure that this is possible.  Alternatively, can custom keyboard layouts be created?  If not, I'm worried that the usefulness of Docs will suffer, at least for Latin students, and that it will be even more difficult to move away from Word.

Similarly but going a step farther, it's impractical for me to do work with Proto-Indo-European (which traditionally does not use IPA), if I have to rely on inserting special characters like *gʷʰ or *ṷ (I can find no syllabic r). This issue isn't as urgent as the need for marking long vowels in Latin, but I would love to be able to do collaborative work with others.

I'll continue to explore Chrome-related questions over the next few months and will share my thoughts here.  As usual, I would greatly appreciate input from others.