Becca Sibrian, a lecturer of German in the Department of World Languages, presented “Testing in the age of COVID” during the Pacific Northwest Council for Language – Stronger Together conference, held virtually this year March 5-6.
During this presentation, she discussed the transition to remote learning in her German courses in the spring of 2020 and how she transitioned to Project Based Assessments to better serve her students and to better highlight what her students could “do” in the language. The second half of this presentation was a workshop to help other language educators brainstorm about this for their classrooms.
Sibrian was also a finalist for the organization’s Teacher of the Year.
This conference was geared towards language educators in the region, with presenters and attendees from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and beyond. For more information about the conference, including session information and presenters, Pacific Northwest Council for Language – Stronger Together.
Sibrian also presented “Reworking existing OER to fit our students’ needs” during the Idaho Open Education Week conference, held virtually March 1-5.
The presentation discussed the joint project that she and Franzi Borders have been working on as part of the OPAL Fellowship through the Idaho State Board of Education. The project is reworking an existing OER textbook for elementary German to better fit the needs of students in Idaho, and especially for Boise State students. In addition to the project, Sibrian talked about the tools that they have been using to create this new open textbook – Pressbooks, H5P and websites with open images and graphic design sources.
This conference was open to all in the State of Idaho interested in OER and how that impacts students and campus communities. A recording of her session (and information about and recordings of other conference sessions) can be found at the conference website: Idaho Open Education Week.