ABSTRACT

The 2020–2021 academic year brought many challenges and disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic but also afforded new opportunities for pedagogical innovations. For teachers who previously had limited experience with online or hybrid language instruction, this year also generated a new learning opportunity, as we used different online resources and strove to keep our lessons engaging and productive to meet learning goals and stimulate student interest within the new environment. With the return to on-campus teaching post-pandemic comes the need to assess which activities and teaching units created for the online environment are worth preserving to enrich the proficiency-based language classroom. In this chapter, we analyze literature and critically assess various digital tools used in our instruction as we explore a “digital toolkit” that can enhance classroom teaching practices and present several online tools and projects that foster interactive, interpretive, and presentational communicative competencies and can be successfully implemented in a traditional classroom setting in teaching Russian as a foreign language.