Success and challenge

During our last Elite training session, I found an effective ActivInspire flipchart and was able to use it successfully that same day. Yeah! I found it easy to use in presenting new material (the passé composé) to my French 2 students, and students seemed to really pay attention. Students also used their clickers to respond to multiple choice items included in the flipchart, helping to keep them engaged.

Inspired to try something new, I tried www.fotobabble.com which lets you upload a picture and narrate a description. You can publish it, imbed it in your Facebook page, and/or send the link in an email, for example to a friend or the teacher. It worked pretty well at home, although it seems to limit the length of the recording to about a minute. A newer feature of the website is the ability to create a narrated slideshow, but you have to make it public. For our students, the option of “private” is probably safer. Unfortunately, however, I couldn’t get the audio to play at school! Here’s the link a student sent me ( http://www.fotobabble.com/m/N3RzVGVLRzMrOVk9 ), but no audio comes through. So, scratch that idea.

So, what can I recommend? Reading through the emails from my technolanguage group, I came across a website for a free online textbook called Interactive French -- http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/. French teachers may recognize the website, but it’s now enhanced and has more links for students.

Other sites I’ve found:

Short blog from “School beyond walls” : http://horslesmurs.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-t-on-le-droit-de-manger-en-cours-1 (Should students have the right to eat in class?) Pretty interesting.

Another blog which includes a number of ideas for using technology in the classroom: http://isabellejones.blogspot.com/2012/02/ict-into-languages-conference.html

Kathy