Scope

The purpose of this French site is to illustrate how technology can be integrated into World Language Curriculum. There are many misconceptions about technology use and its impact on student learning. Some people think that time spent on technology is time wasted and taken from instructional time. They also think that creative technology projects are appealing but have very little educational value. Unstructured creative projects in language classes can be a big waste of time, whereas very structured projects with detailed project expectation and rubrics can be very valuable assessments of a student’s language proficiency.

I plan to make this site a resource primarily for teachers, students and parents of any world language since the ideas can easily translate to any target language. I began integrating technology into my curriculum seven years ago and have learned a lot about the process that I want to share. I have been teaching French in Middle School for 20 years and I am more excited than ever and love the energy and real life skills incorporating French and technology have brought to my classroom. This is the first year of a three year plan to keep adding depth and utility to this site. So 2002 is the target for the finished product.

This web site begins with our learning expectations in 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grade. There is also a link to our K12-curriculum for parents, students and schools that might be starting world language on the elementary level.

Building a unit begins with teaching the basic elements of grammar and vocabulary. The integration starts next with Internet explorations that illustrates the use of the learning in its real world application. My students have helped me find great French web sites with authentic information that bring powerful resources to French I curriculum. I want to publish pages with links related to each unit of study. The content of the sites I link to is very important since they should use the vocabulary the students have studied, add a rich cultural dimension and be easy to navigate.

Once the research page is done I will publish the rubrics for the multi-media creations that culminates the units. The next resource page will link to instructions for the software used in each project. The final page will be examples of student work that range from the cool to the magnificent. The projects demonstrate how you can adapt to the extraordinary variety among our middle school learners and reach students with different learning styles and abilities.

I have many target audiences. The main ones I will address will be colleagues, students, and parents. The community at large will be my secondary audience. I will create the pages to be used to inform other teachers while serving as a resource I will use with my students as I continue to refine the units. I hope to keep adding to the resource till it is incredibly rich and basically outlines my whole course online. I have visions of the students pulling up vocabulary pages with pictures and pronunciation for our entire vocabulary. I want to publish grammar explanations and exercises to practice. I want to publish HyperStudio stacks for them to download. These would be based on vocabulary and grammar with illustrations and sound they can play then record their own voices to see if they match the real pronunciation.

I would also like to develop think quests and searches involving history, art music, social issues and daily news. I hope to have forums like we had in this class with students all over the world that are studying French. Then comparing housing families, holidays and customs with kids from China, Russia, etc... who are also studying French would be very powerful.

I hope that the community would enjoy these pages also. Many people have studied French but have not used it in a long time. I would hope they would enjoy perusing the site and refreshing their memories while marveling at my students’ ability to use French. Hah!

I am going to use pictures, publish PowerPoint presentations, Hyperstudio projects and student web pages. I want to learn to publish sound. I have published some PowerPoint Presentations already but I’m not happy with the animation features and need to work to present the projects to highlight the animations and sound imbedded in each one.

The primary content areas will be

Information

Curriculum

Philosophy and learning activities

Schedules

K-12 continuum

Exchange information

Collaboration with classes in France

Intro to the 2 schools we work with and where they are in France

Web pages students have published for one another.

Description of common projects and use of e-mail.

This is where I am right now!!!! More to come!
Career information

Language associations

Articles about language learning

Food and Restaurant Unit

Links page

Rubrics for projects