Wednesday, April 29, 2009

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!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

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.