Dr. Janice Siegel

Department of Foreign Languages, ISU

Application for the Distance Education Training Program

Dates: June 4 – July 11, 2001

Proposal: Interactive Website for Latin 111, Fall 2001

  1. Qualifications for teaching a web-enabled or distance education course.

I have a great deal of experience working with the internet. First, I maintain an extensive website ( featuring over 4000 pages, every one of which I designed, wrote and illustrated myself using Front Page). The site houses two projects, The Survey ofAudio-Visual Resources for Classics, for which I am both print and web editor, and Dr. J’s Illustrated Guide to the Classical World, a collection of illustrated archaeological sites, texts, and lectures. My website attracts over 5000 distinct visitors every month. For the past year I have also served as Internet Coordinator for the Intellectual Heritage program at Temple University. In that capacity, I write, design, coordinate, and maintain the program’s two websites ( and the faculty password-protected site, user name: ihfaculty, password: xenos) and I am a list owner of the program’s several listservs. I also run listservs for my own classes. For the past several semesters I have encouraged my students to email their papers in as attachments and I comment on them using the Microsoft Word “track changes” feature so my (now legible) comments appear in color when I mail the paper back.

  1. Description of a single, specific course that will be the subject of instructional technology enhancement for a distance education offering.

I wish to prepare an interactive website for the Latin 111 course. My plan is to develop on-line exercises to supplement the text I have chosen for the program (Wheelock’s Latin). This is a new text for Latin students at ISU, and I wish to greet them in the fall with a well-articulated plan of study and drill. The best part of this project is that it builds on the work of similarly interested classicists instead of either paralleling or duplicating their efforts. Professor Dale Grote, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, has encouraged me to e-revolutionize the large body of ancillary material he has made available on the web and in print for several years ( My plan is to create interactive quizzes using his material and mine, based on the vocabulary, grammar, and readings as introduced in sequence in the text. I am grateful for the multiple choice questions Dale has provided for my use ( and for my own translations of the accompanying stories, but this does not make the task any less formidable: for the pages to be truly useful, I will need to put in not just the questions and answers, but coaching, commentary, and hints. I wish to duplicate the success of Dale’s similar pages in his companion website for Powell's Classical Myths at the Prentice Hall site: I am interested in using the same quiz construction program Dale has ("Question Mark"): it automatically grades each quiz and even sends a copy of each set of results to email accounts provided by the student! The website I seek funding to create will become a fabulous resource to students studying Latin with Wheelock’s text at ISU and elsewhere, and it will bring ISU a reputation for contributing cutting-edge classics pedagogical materials to the international on-line classics community.

  1. Evidence of previous use of technology in instruction.

Over the course of my five years at Temple University, I gradually added web-based elements to my Intellectual Heritage classes (equivalent to gen ed courses at ISU). I began by writing illustrated lectures designed to make the ancient world accessible and relevant to my students. Using my own stock of photographs, I created a host of illustrated lectures designed to explain and enhance the texts my students are expected to study. I myself scanned and manipulated each photo, wrote the copy, designed the pages, and ftp’ed them up to the site (in the days before FP extensions). My on-linesyllabus and course calendar are hyperlinked to all relevant pages - program and course information, study guides, paper topics. I teach my classes in a smart classroom and I regularly use the internet during the course of the class, especially in my Special Topics in Classical Culture class, for which my students are maintaining a class website that has amazed me. My students give power point presentations in class on a regular basis and then the class webmaster, whom I trained, transfers the materials to the website. I have also experimented with the peculiar advantages of web-based materials on the IH webpages: see Dr. Karras’ Bad Essay (and How to Dodge This Bullet).

  1. Evidence of previous attempts at instructional innovations in classes

See above.

  1. Commitment to completing the entire program…

I just very recently accepted the offer to join the faculty of ISU. Should I get this grant, I will plan my entire summer around it. I look forward to learning new skills, to getting to know the people I will be working with for years to come, to becoming ISU-acclimated before the fall term begins, to creating a bank of teaching materials for the fall. I am prepared to move to Normal the first week of June to participate fully in this workshop. I have participated in technology seminars before – many times – at Temple University, and I have even been an invited speaker at an ITUG (Instructional Technology User Group) meeting. As Internet Coordinator and Webmaster of IH, I have also spoken at orientation meetings for new faculty to introduce them to the web-based technology available and useful for teaching in our program. I will be most happy to share what I have learned with those interested.