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 Ratings
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| Reviewed: |
Jan 18, 2005 by World Languages Editorial Board |
| Overview: |
This large collection of pedagogical resources is designed for a variety of
different audiences, but especially for for Latin teachers. It is also
accessible for students, especially adult / independent learners. Most of the
material is easy to use, even by novice teachers. The site includes a wide
variety of teacher submitted materials including: Strategies for teaching Latin,
Lesson plans, handouts teachers and students can use immediately in class,
modern documents such as the Bill of Rights translated into Latin, SAT review
exercises; games; a making Roman coins class activity; materials for Vergils
Aeneid book one, a discussion group you can join, and useful links for students
and teachers.
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| Learning Goals: |
Teaching and learning Latin, primarily at the elementary level.
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| Target Student Population: |
Primarily teachers of beginning level learners
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| Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills: |
None; this site would be an excellent place for a new Latin teacher or adult
self learner who needs a guiding hand.
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| Type of Material: |
Text articles and links.
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| Recommended Uses: |
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| Technical Requirements: |
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| Strengths: |
The materials here should perhaps be a first-stop for all new Latin teachers in
search of online resources. For one starting out teaching, this site would be
like having a few dozen master teachers all giving you some of their gems.
There are items here for almost every stage of the first year of Latin teaching
and learning, and it should be extremely helpful to new teachers to have such a
collection of tested ideas described in detail (in most cases) in one place! The
concepts and models that are presented are frequently geared toward high school
Latin classes and quite often offer ways to approach material on the AP exam.
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| Concerns: |
A number of the links are stale. This is of particular importance in the case of
the Collaborative Self-Study Latin course and the Continuing Education for
Latin Teachers, both of which topics are likely to arouse interest, only to
disappoint users who discover that they refer to activities from 2001. The page
entitled Mnemonic Devices found off of the second-tier page
(http://www.latinteach.com/mnemonics.html) has some new and many age-old memory
devices. Many more are out there in use, and teachers should contribute to
this a .NET driven back-page for collection of this material into a database as
submitted by users would be a wonderful addition.
Organization on such a large site is very important. This is an area that could
use quite significant improvement. The first page is easily enough navigated,
and the two best areas of the site are listed first and actually lead to the
same second-tier page; the how-to articles with teaching strategies and the
lesson-plan pages are together then together on the same second-tier page,
and
the several links under reviews are also on that same page, for over 50 links,
and these should be separated into at least three separate pages. The largest
concern though goes far beyond ease of navigation to a more fundamental
problem; the organization of these two most important areas is alphabetical,
which is perfectly rational, but less-than-helpful for the beginning teacher who
comes to the site for general helpthe Roman coins area, e.g., is under M as
the page is entitled, Making Roman Coins a marvelous activity, but it can
get lost in the shuffle. The page which gives great help to the teacher on how
to deal with students too-frequent lack of basic English grammar skills is
found under I for the page starts with the word Introducing.
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Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool |
Rating:   |
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| Strengths: |
The resources here are excellent
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| Concerns: |
See above commentsit is finding them that will prove the challenge for the
beginning instructor. Not only a re-organization would help, but some
introductory pages telling the user more about what is on the site, and perhaps
some numbered plans created for the teacher or self-learner, perhaps along the
lines of Start Here
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Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty |
| Rating: |
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| Strengths: |
The site loads very quickly, none of the pages require a fast-connection
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| Concerns: |
See above; organization and page-titles are problematic.
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| Other Issues and Comments: |
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