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As we come to the end of 2014, our first year of including an original Activity of the Week in each InterCom issue, it's a good time to mention a few favorites.  Here are my top 5:

Apologizing. Interlanguage pragmatics is a new area of concern for me, and I learned a lot from our director Julie Sykes's article, "Giving Feedback in the Service of Meaning," and this activity that accompanied it. I may be better at navigating apologies in any language now, too!

Meaningful Use of Online Translators. I know from the many listserv discussions I follow that many teachers are concerned about students cheating by using online translators, which tend to give them poor results anyway. I like this activity, which embraces the new technology and teaching students about both the limitations and the beneficial use of online translators.

Web of Similarities. One of my highlights in 2014 was getting to help teach Swahili to a great group of high school students in the College Readiness Academy. We did this activity as a way to get to know each other and to use the Swahili that we'd just begun to learn; re-reading it gives me fond memories of our students who came from all over the country to learn together.

Arriving in a New City: Creating a Vocabulary Mind-Map. I love the richness and depth of this activity, designed by our new research assistant Renee Marshall. It includes explicit teaching of strategies and authentic materials, with enough information that I could use it to create similar activities for languages other than German.

An Opportunity for Differentiation: Tiered Telecollaboration Project. Adrienne Gonzales wrote an article for us, "Enhacing Independent Learning with Telecollaboration," that left me inspired to try telecollaboration but still uncertain about where to start or how to organize it with a class, until I read her accompanying activity - containing exactly the information I was looking for!