The first way is through what I call the Road-Map exercise. This is an exercise I inherited from Professor Boatwright in Fall 2013. The assigned readings in Intermediate Latin are rendered into a double-spaced PDF document, which students then print out and bring to class. In addition to bringing their printouts with them, they are required to make a road map of the Latin in the following way: they must write MV over all main verbs, surround main clauses with square brackets [ ], and place round brackets around subordinate clauses ( ). The project becomes digital when we use a digital camera to project the road-map of a student selected at random to project on a screen for all to see. As we go through the translation, we correct any mistakes the student might have made on his road map, and we suggest additional notes to help students visualize finer points of Latin syntax, such as indirect statement and hyperbaton.

The second way is through a bonus recitation project, which I instituted myself. A major bonus of this project is that it gives the teacher something immediately to fall back on whenever students request to talk about their grades. Using the technology of Audacity/Lame, students record a recitation of a given passage and sends it to me in the form of an MP3 along with their permission for me to use it on my website.

Using Audacity with Lame is easy. There are buttons for play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, stop, and record. You click the record button, then start speaking, then click the stop button after that. This next step is where it gets tricky: instead of clicking file / save, as you would with a word-document, you click file / export, and, if you have installed Lame in addition to Audacity (as one should), then the program will automatically use Lame to convert the file to an MP3, in which you can enter fields of meta-data for year, track name, album name, artist, etc. After a student’s first recording, often I record myself reciting the Latin to give students an impression of where they can improve.