ANVILL Opens its Doors!

Dear Language (2.0) Educators,

Greetings from the Yamada Language Center. Interest in ANVILL has grown this Fall--we now have over 1500 students using the software. Yet much remains to be done, and we welcome your feedback on how to make this tool more useful and accessible. (The teacher blog is one way you can talk out loud to other ANVILL-using colleagues).

We're currently working hard on getting the word out and finalizing documentation for v. 2.0—illustrated instructions for ANVILL's core tools can be found by clicking on the Help tab in the upper right hand corner. If you've worked with other content management systems (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.), creating web-based content with ANVILL should come easily. You can create your "lessons" offline in a word processor, then just copy and paste them into ANVILL. Of course ANVILL's text editor works fine, too, and has far more "hypertext" and "media" possibilities.

What do you need to make ANVILL work? A modern web browser (Firefox 3.5x Safari 4x, Internet Explorer 8), Adobe's Flash player, and to take full advantage of tools like Voiceboards, Livechat, and Quiz and Surveys, a headset or webcam.

ANVILL is free to language teachers in the United States. Once you have a teacher's account; you'll be able to add your own courses and enroll your students (see conditions for use below). We'll help you as much as possible with getting started. We regularly do trainings at professional conferences, including upcoming workshops at COFLT, NASILP and ACTFL.

The screencasts below give you an idea of some of ANVILL's features and functions (Quicktime req'd).

Conditions for Teacher Use

• Your school must be in the United States and you must have an email account that shows your academic affiliation, e.g., .edu, .k12, .org (you may not register for a Teacher's account with a commercial internet provider email address (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc).
• This software is only meant to be used in educational settings. Other uses, inappropriate to best practices in education, will result in a loss of privileges. Once you begin using ANVILL, your use of it is governed by the University of Oregon Acceptable Use Policy.
• Please note that ANVILL is still under development, so some features or layouts may change without notice, perhaps causing a loss of data. Where possible, a local back-up of your and your students' work is essential.

October 10, 2009