Le Futuroscope

There's a sample prezi lower on this blog. To open the link on the last slide, hold the "ctrl" key while pressing the left side of your mouse. Students made prezis to display information on French culture or geography that they had researched through the online book and other websites.

Prezis

French III students worked with prezis to complete a biography project recently. Most of these turned out really well. I'll have to figure out how to embed one in this blog so that it can be viewed.

Animation

In inservice today we attempted several types of animation including voki.com (a sample is below the posts), Go!Animate, and xtranormal.com. The challenge is getting the voices to pronounce the French words correctly. Voki offered the suggestion to spell things phonetically when necessary which worked out better for me than the other two sites. The next goal will be to get students using one or more of these webtools to produce "mini-movies" using dialog they have written.

Voicethread

I experimented with voicethread.com, producing a very brief sample for my students. I thought I would have the opportunity to edit it after embedding it in my blog, but it doesn't seem to be allowing me the chance to do that. I had planned, for example, to use the markers to indicate which of the grandkids I was talking about at different points during my narrative.
I also struggled to get the voicethread onto my blog. I learned that the voicethread apparently has to be made public before embedding it. Any advice there would also be appreciated!
Another sample voicethread was posted recently. Both of the voicethreads are lower on this blog. You have to click the "I'll do it later" button to get rid of the box over each voicethread when you want to listen to it.

One-to-One Computers

We're now using one-to-one computers here at MNW, and it's proving to be both exhilarating and challenging. We've experimented with a lot of cool new technology tools which has been fun as well as a great learning experience. One of my biggest challenges, though, is working with the French spelling marks (AKA accents) as they're proving impossible to add on many of the websites (like this blog) that we use. Any helpful suggestions out there would be much appreciated!