NEALL, an IALL regional group, will hold its annual regional Conference March 6 to 8, 1998 at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs in New York State. We have an excellent program of presentations from our members and friends in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ne w York and beyond. As in the past, we welcome both Conference presenters and registrants from all regions. Our friends in New England who are close to upstate New York are welcome too!
At the March Conference at Skidmore College, you will meet foreign language faculty and learning resource center staff in an informal setting where you can share ideas, strategies and applications of technology in foreign language teaching and learning. Many of the presentations will describe collaborative development efforts between Colleges to develop innovative uses of broad-based tools such as lesson templates, on-line applications, the Internet and Web, or the networked classroom. The program place s particular emphasis upon presentations that discuss strategies to involve faculty in development of new materials and methods, to provide reward and support for faculty, and to assess the effectiveness of new resources created for classroom, lab or inde pendent study applications. Past Conferences have included experienced language faculty and technologists as well as neophytes learning and experimenting with new methods for the first time.
You will also learn more about the design and uses of the new Skidmore College Foreign Language Resource Center. If you have designed a new facility recently, or are in the process, you will hear presenters describe their efforts to combine audio, video and computer applications in a single networked environment.
With a long-awaited renovation and expansion of the Foreign Language Resource Center completed this past fall, we look forward to hosting the NEALL '98 Conference at Skidmore. The new facility includes a twenty-station Mac lab/classroom combined with the existing Tandberg IS-10 system, a service area, a small lounge with several workstations, and a room for group work with scanning and videodisc stations.
Funded by the College and the Mellon Foundation, the Center was completed in time for the beginning of our 3-year Mellon project at Skidmore. The Mellon project supports the development of multimedia activities using the X Media Engine Templates created by David Herren at Middlebury College.
Several faculty members have completed projects with the aid of release time provided by the grant and five more faculty will be working on projects this semester. Most of the projects consist of developing thematically based activities for elementary and intermediate language courses to be shared with other faculty at Skidmore and on Middlebury's Flannet.
The Skidmore faculty welcome the opportunity to discuss their projects and interact with others involved in exploring the applications of technology in the foreign language and literature curriculum at the NEALL Conference.