Digital storytelling

I'm wondering if any of you have used any of the digital storytelling resources online??  We do a lot of storytelling in the world language dept and would like to encorporate this technology into our curriculum for next year.  Please share if you have used any.

Merci

Sample research questions, beginning level

Biography project on famous frenchies. My students have chosen a topic.  They registered on the research project calculator.  they began to write research questions.  they have recorded 8-10 facts in French.  They are about to research in depth their research questions, which is step 2 "Gather information".

I am concerned about the quality of their research questions.  Wondering where we could find a list of examples of good, simple research questions from ??  middle school science fair/history day projects.  Does any one have any suggestions??

Facebook: luv it at home, ??classroom use

I think I should be a p.r. person for the Facebook company.  I love the online social networking!  It is a wonderful option for the full time working parent of 3 children who rarely wanders out of the 3 mile radius from her house besides to go to work.  

Facebook allows me to "keep in touch" with friends by checking on their online pictures and reading updates.  It allows me to feel like I am keeping up with people who I am only able to see in person and/or talk "live" to/with a couple times a year.  

In addition to this it is a time saver.  I can check in with people without having to commit lots of time to socializing.  I can  check in with them on my schedule, usually late at night, and not worry about the hour.

I am considering using facebook for a class project.  I would begin a different facebook page that I would use just for school and with another email address.  has anyone tried this for a class project, ongoing discussions with easy photo access, etc??

How can we YouTube in Mpls schools?

I really want to show the copyright video about Creative Commons that we saw in class titled,  "Wanna Work Together?"   The problem is that the video is on YouTube.  Is  my best option to save it to my computer at home and then burn it to a disk?  I just tried that and ?maybe it was a bad disc, but it didn't work.  

Any suggestions or easy ways to save a YouTube video some other way, ?memory stick?, let me know, please.  I'm hoping to show it this Friday to my students if i can find a way.

Merci!

G-cast and the big $$ charge for calling in???

Thanks Karen for the alternate sites. I must say that I was all set up to use this as a great and easy way to have my students practice and assess their speaking skills. However, I am not ready to cough up the $100 yet.

I did put up the website and directions on my teacher page, along with a list of speaking assignments for this quarter. I look forward to playing with the alternate sites and learning about them more before I actually assign this work.

Let me know if anyone has used other options for Gcast, other than podcasting from a computer. I have done that and know how, but was looking forward to an easier method that was more available and quick for all students.

The Language Menu

Gaelle Berg sent me a website link that is another great resource for fellow language teachers. It is called Language Menu and has vocabulary games, concentration/memory, geography, etc. on all the basic topics and in many different languages. I am going to try out one of these in class with my students as a warm up activity this week.

Another warm up that I have liked using is the Clickers. Students like doing their warm ups this way and for quizzes it is a great way to give a Pretest and/or a quiz of any kind and get immediate feedback.

Fourth quarter...the research project!

This quarter I am going to do something different with my final project. I am going to imbed the work into the entire quarter and work on it a little each week. I also plan to complete it and grade it by the end of week 8. This way students wgho did not complete the project, usually because they don't believe me how much a summative assessment worth 35% of their grade can change their grade, they will have a full week to complete it if they wish to improve their grade before the end of the quarter.

I also really like the idea of feeling like the project not only is totally connected to our main focus of the quarter, but that it is imbedded and not something done at the end. The reason for this is that I wish I had started the Autobiography project during the first weeks of the quarter, instead of waiting til week 7.

Our research project is going to be on a French-speaking (francophone) person of their choice. I have dropped the idea of making them choose a musician, and have decided that my main goal is to encourage them to find a personal link to the french world via someone they are interested in for their own personal reasons.

I am still considering allowing students to work in small groups or with a partner, to support their need to socialize during spring/final quarter. I have a Wikpedia list of Frenchies on my website and am going to have students choose their person this week. I am also going to try out the Research Calculator next week in the lab with students. Any recommendations from teachers who have used it so far would be welcome! Merci.

Powerpoint projects

Reflecting on my third quarter project...I had my 120 French students write and publish into a 10+ slide powerpoint their Autobiographies. The goal was for students to learn to write about themselves in French and to build community in the classroom.

Students presented their projects the week before Spring break and they had a lot of fun showing off their pictures of their families and themselves as children as well as their favorites- sports, music, places, etc. They memorized and read 10-15 sentences aloud to the class, allowing them to NOT have to read things that we have not practiced in class.

It took 5 visits to the computer lab to get 80% of the students finished creating a project that was written before we went to the lab. We went 2 more times during the week of our basketball tournament, where only half the students were there each day. I always wonder at the end of a big project if I spent too much time off of our learning how to speak...but students had fun with it and were engaged.

Teacher Website & online vocab review links**

My teacher web page has turned into my favorite resource from our mili training.  I had a teacher web page prior to the training but it was not very "user friendly" for my students.  I am excited about having my webpage as a useful tool for my teaching.

I know have a link to online vocab review games, where I load new vocab games with every story set we do.  The students love the online games and they can play them once during a class period and then go home or continue to review using the online games when they stay after school.  The two sites that I have used for this and have found really teacher and student friendly are: quia.com and quizlet.com.   Check them out they are sites that teachers from every subject area could use and all you have to do is type in the list of vocab terms and their definition and the site creates tons of review activities and online quizzes for students to practice the terms.

I have also used the webpage as a place to post some class photos, post classwork, class stories, and project outlines.  I have posted the Directions for every time we have gone to the computer lab this year.  This is helpful for students who are absent and it has been a consistent thing so students all know how we start every class in the computer lab by going to my webpage and reading the Directions under "class assignments".   I finally have a webpage where I can upload work and I know that every student I have knows how to find my webpage from home and can get the info that I post.  Also, they can email me b/c they now all have Gmail accounts.  I feel pretty modern and techy due to my new online resource knowledge!!  Merci Karen and all the Mili instructors, you're awesome!!

IB Diploma program training & blogging

I am going to an IB DP training for Language B this Friday in Portland, OR.   This will be my 3rd IB training, my first in the area of DP, the other 2 trainings that I have had were for MYP.  I am looking forward to the training and hoping to find some time to catch up on my blogging.  

I am hoping that we will get some new resources for language b studies and that someone there will be able to help me find resources in French that are geared toward elementary level readers.

Even though I have not kept up with my blogging during the past 2 months, I have continued to work on the web 2000 skills that I have acquired during our Mili training.  I have continued to bring my students to the computer lab, however this qtr I have been going every 2 wks due to some traffic in the labs.  Also, we spent the last week in Feb celebrating Mardi Gras for 2 class days.  We have continued to write about our weekends in French on the google account and now that they can read and comment on each others writing, the task has a lot more "Real Life" meaning to them, as opposed to when they were just writing on pen and paper and handing it in to me and sharing it aloud once a month.

Preparing for our 4th Quarter Research Project

My students have been acting out, co-creating and reading stories about famous people this quarter.  Our end of the quarter, qtr 3, project is to write and present our Autobiographies in French to the class.  Students have been reading stories about famous people that I wrote in the first person to help them with this process.  This past week they began to brainstorm ideas for their autobiography and fill in an outline in French.  

I am trying to build up their vocabulary in order to make the jump from Autobiography to Biography easier.  We are reviewing some basic vocabulary and sentence structures for talking about our: families, schools, interests, jobs and careers for the future.  I now need to start searching for good reference material in French that is written at a more basic level, like an encyclopedia written for younger students.  I am not sure how to do my google searching for this and am hoping to create a list of great reference materials in French on French famous musicians/good sources for youth.  I want to avoid having students find information and just cut and paste it into a bad free online translator site.  

Google reader account a success

The google reader accounts have taken me forever to set up.  Now that the students are finally able to read each others blogs and comment on them, it is amazing!  The kids are so motivated to read the French blogs, written in French, and to learn how to comment on them, in French in the form of a question/comment, that it even surprises them how much fun it can be.  It has been great to see the students motivated this past month due to the reader accounts.  

My next challenge is beginning the real research process and doing so in both English and fRench and keeping it basic enough that students will be able to report back to the class orally on the majority/summary of their findings.