Welcome

Welcome to my workshop "Creating Language Interactivity on the Web," hosted by Colby College at its Language Resource Center on November 7, 1997. This workshop is an introduction to part of my work on the WWW, namely, the design of language exercises that serve as a learning and teaching tool for both the student and the instructor. Go to my Spanish Language Exercises to see the original exercises in more detail. As in that site, here I will cover two types of exercises: Web form-based exercises that students send to their instructors to be graded or reviewed. Exercises designed in JavaScript that provide feedback to the user. They don't use web forms and are not sent to any e-mail account. From a technical point of view, these exercises are the most complex ones, because they require a certain amount of knowledge of JavaScript programming. I am not a programmer (if you are a programmer, forgive my occasional inaccuracies and send me an e-mail so I can correct them), and I know how difficult programming and authoring can be sometimes. This workshop will help you to create some interactive exercises so you can later design your own. Hopefully, anyone will be able to complete several interactive web pages by the end of the session. There are two basic types of tutorials in this workshop: Tutorials 1-4 help you to create four different self-check web pages. All of them are written in JavaScript. Before actually working on any of the tutorials, take a look at its respective template included at the beginning of the tutorial to see what type of web document you will be getting at the end. Tutorials 5-6 teach how to incorporate web forms in HTML in order for the instructors to receive their students' assignments in an e-mail account. I hope that you find useful information here and that these pages enrich your own dialogue with issues of technology and language learning and teaching. Enjoy.