Just for Fun

Everyone loves commercials.  How many of us spend more time talking about the Super Bowl commercials than about the game itself?  For language teachers and learners, commercials are especially useful because they are short, use authentic language, and the ‘plot’ is generally very easy to follow.  The CulturePub site at http://www.culturepub.fr is a wonderful source of commercials from around the world.  You can browse from the home page or search by theme, brand, business, country, or decade.  Yes, there are even ‘historic’ commercials on the site.  Every Monday, there is a new magazine d’actualité, a short video of commentaries on specific commercials.  One note of caution:  there are commercials and themes on this site that may not be appropriate for all ages. 

Do you have an iPhone or iPod Touch?  If so, you may also be interested in the TéléPub application.  This free app lets you view all the commercials aired on French television during the last seven days.  You can browse or search by channel or by theme (alimentation, boissons, informatique, etc.).  An explanation of the app is available in both text and video at the site of france televisions publicité [http://www.ftv-publicite.fr/spip.php?rubrique458].  For students interested in new technologies, this video provides a wealth of vocabulary about the iPhone and the App Store.

Website of the month / Just for Fun

Evernote:  http://www.evernote.com/about/learn_more/

Evernote is a site designed to help you organize and control information such as texts, audio files, photos, handwritten notes, images, and more.  This site is similar to OneNote from  Microsoft but is stored online, not on a personal device, and is free for the basic (and limited) version.  It’s very cool and infinitely useful !  You can load and save anything to a site you create (very easy to do, took less than 5 minutes).  Evernote will allow you to search your “notes” by the tags you add AND it recognizes the text in the photos / documents and will let you search by that too!  Dr. Orlando Kelm, professor at UT-Austin, has a site he shares in Evernote: http://www.evernote.com/pub/orkelm/CultureTextPictures .  He is not a French teacher but has photos he has stored here from his many travel destinations.  The site itself explains some uses: scan business cards, receipts, plane tickets, maps, to-do lists, photos, notes from meetings, websites, favorite recipes, etc.  Anything you want to remember and be able to find, you can type, scan, or load into Evernote and have it available from any computer.  The information is private by default but you can share portions with the public as you choose.  Remember, the program will “read” the text in your messages, photos, tickets, business cards, etc. and let you search for it without you having to type a thing.

 I made a sample public page to demonstrate how one might use this resource with photos.  Here’s my site: http://www.evernote.com/pub/rawson/francephotos.  If you click on that link, three photos will appear.  I created a notebook called “France photos” and then added each photo as a note.  I wrote in a “tag” for each photo and you see those listed on the left.  But, here’s the cool feature.  Go to the search box in the top right window and type in “Perou”.  The site will display the photo of me in Paris.  The word “Perou” is a word in the background of the photo!  It’s not a tag, not content that I entered: Evernote can search all words in a photo! 

The possible classroom applications for this site are great.  One may have to consider the premium version, which costs $5 a month, to make maximum usage of it.  However, I would love to load more photos here from my travels and from my students.  We could then have them stored in one place to use in class (which many sites can do) but also to have students search and find things for homework (feature unique to Evernote as I understand it).   I could scan menus, TGV tickets, metro passes, and more to show them authentic documents that the computer can “read”.  Dr. Kelm also does cross-cultural comparison work with his photos: ask students to send you photos in the US displaying a certain cultural situation (mealtime, how close people stand to one another, greetings, etc.) and then find a photo of the same situation abroad and analyze / compare.  Our “digital native” or “Millennial” students prefer photos to texts and would love an assignment requiring them to take photos, load them, and tag them.  This medium really speaks to many different learning styles and lends itself well for classroom applications, in addition to helping the teacher organize his / her realia.  Try it today!  It truly is easy to get started and they even have a video showing you more: http://www.evernote.com/about/video/ .  Enjoy!

December 2009: http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/tivi5/jeux.php

This site, which is part of the TV5 site, contains games geared towards young children. However, since many of these games do use some language & directions are usually given in French, they could be used with older children as a fun diversion from more serious class work.  During our language lab block, I occasionally allow students to go to this site once they have finished their assignment, during the last 5-10 min. of class.

October 2009: http://prezi.com/

Need a new spin on the old PowerPoint presentation? Check out this neat
site which gives your presentations an interesting twist! Instead of
going from slide to slide, you zoom in and out to different locations on
one slide.

the World Fact Book! Here is a comprehensive site to get facts about France and other countries. 

February 2009: www.mangerbouger.fr

Here is a great site full of authentic material for students if you’re studying health or fitness!

www.mangerbouger.fr  has been updated. This link http://www.mangerbouger.fr/menu-secondaire/communication/  takes you to the audio/visual section where you can show actual commercials aired by the Ministère de la Santé. There are also radio commercials for purely aural practice! This is a great tool for interpretive assessments, and can be a springboard for the other modes of interpersonal and presentational assessments.

January 2009: Language Games

Take a minute to look at the cool language games found on this site. The perk is that they are not the usual predictable games and the animation is very nice and appealing not only to lower division students but also to university tech expert students.  There is a wide variety of games so I recommend looking at the games first to try them out before actually doing them with your students. The verb games will show you the wrong answers and then offer a review.  The site is mainly for beginners but there are links to advanced activities and geography. 

October 2008: Check out the French lyrics website: http://www.greatsong.net/ .
 
http://www.greatsong.net , is a wonderful website, very helpful to learn French language, contains more than 2 million songs, Lyrics of 500.000 French songs both old and contemporary, 50.000 translations (English / French) and it is one of the most popular and visited websites in this area of interest.

April 2008: Post Secret France follows in the tradition of the popular book and American website. Have your students analyze these personal statements made by French speakers. Warning: This is probably something that would be better for older students or teachers should preview the site before they share it. 

March 2008: Take your students to this website to explore the Youth language in France. It could be very informative and interesting if you plan on showing a movie, an advertisement, a TV show, read a book or listen to a song for instance, which employs colloquial language a lot.

The website is well designed and user-friendly. In the ‘dictionnaire de la zone, you can search by word/ expression or even quotations. The website also gives you access to a dictionary of ‘verlan’. There is also a forum where users can interact, which is particularly interesting as it represents a great source of authentic French language.

http://www.dictionnairedelazone.fr/

February 2008: http://fr.youtube.com/

You Tube, Global Warming, and Creative Writing

One of my favorite videos accessible on You Tube is Yannick Noah’s Aux arbres citoyens !  Designed as an animated story, seemingly appealing to a young audience, this video addresses the serious topic of global warming.  The song has a catchy tune and the video a smart look, but beyond the entertainment factor, this You Tube video can become a fun learning tool when you mute the sound and invite your students to create the script that depicts the scenes.  Proposed as an activity in a language lab setting, it invites the students to discover their creative writing skills in French and gives them an opportunity to write collaboratively.

December 2007 http://www.learn-french-language-software.com/games/index.htm and specifically

http://www.transparent.com/languagepages/french/games.htm

For the students: language games that are not your usual mots-croisés.  Particularly interesting are the “Unscramble” and the “Plug-in” language games.  These appear to be free, I’ve personally tried them on several occasions.  The sentences or paragraphs change every time you log in or end a game.  Games are also timed so they may be useful for students practicing for the AP exam.  Although for the “International café” game you may have to download or buy software, it also seems interesting and something students would enjoy.  Technical note: sometimes you might have to click “home” and then “games from the left panel to access the game page.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~ik2r-myr/english/choixat.htm

For the teacher: how confident are you on your French skills?  A good and quite difficult French test to keep you up to date on your French knowledge!

If you are an AP French Language teacher, you will appreciate the students’ humorous attempt not only to create their own video project for class, but to break down “the essentials” for preparing for the AP French Language exam.

October 2007
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/cool/
Keep up with the latest slang with this great web site!  Another resource of the BBC Languages site, this page is the “essential guide to young French people’s slang”.  You can listen to expressions and words, which are organized by topic (family, politics, friends …) and also by level of formality (familier, vulgaire, verlan).

September 2007
www.france24.com - French CNN- has current events in article format, and video.  This is probably better for more advanced students

www.meteofrance.com - Great website for practicing weather! It has the current weather conditions, as well as forecasts. This is a great and fun way to practice the weather. Have your students do a weather forecast with this site as their background!

May 2007 - http://meilleursprenoms.com – Let your students look up their French names to find the origin, meaning, jour de fête, and popularity statistics. Also gives most popular names by region and year, names the stars give their children and other fun facts. Tons of fun!

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April 2007 - Les perles du bac 

“Comme Bonaparte, Jules César pouvait dicter plusieurs letters à la fois, c’était un dictateur.”

See if your students can find the humor in these errors made on the baccalauréat.  While the authenticity of these statements can’t be verified, they are quite funny.

http://mermoz.yvesd.net/perlesbac.php

http://urv.aurelien.free.fr/humour/perles/perles_du_bac.php

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March 2007 - Creating Fun and Educational Activities with Quia.com

http://www.quia.com

This subscription site is a wonderful resource for teachers that allows students to reinforce grammar in a fun and innovative way.

Quia allows teachers to make a class site with its own URL (web address) that students can access from any Internet-connected computer.

Teachers can create their own activities using Flash or other programs; however it is easier to add activities that have been created by other teachers to your class site. The activities are in the form of fun games like Battleship or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and tests specific grammar points. Teachers can search for activities by grammar point, or text book.

There is also a feature that allows teachers to create online quizzes for their classes!

The site allows teachers a 30 day free trial. After that, the subscription fee is $49 per year, and there are discounts for groups of teachers, if a department would like to subscribe.

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February 2007 - Une Carte Postale

Send a postcard to your students or to a friend: http://photos.linternaute.com/pays/297/france/

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This site is actually good for teaching vocabulary as well as being a lot of fun.  Choose descriptive expressions for hair, eyes, nose and other facial features and watch the image change. It’s flexible enough that students can even create caricatures of themselves!

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Long collection of French Tongue Twisters http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/fr.htm#T1

Blog (stopped in 2005) by an American living in Paris. Looks at various cultural aspects. ttp://michaelsviewpoint.blogspot.com/2005/06/little-reading-over-dinner.html

Being from Belgium, I could not pass the opportunity to bring up chocolate. Learn about the history, the making of and enjoy the recipes http://www.choco-club.com/

Review your French by playing the typical French game of Jeu de l’Oie. Different levels, topics. Possibility to submit your ideas to the webmaster who will create a version for you. http://jeudeloie.free.fr/mde.htm

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Visit this site to hear the radio in France, check out podcasts, news and other world media.

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La Coquette: http://lacoquette.blogs.com/ (blog of a 26 year old American living in Paris)

Chroniques d'une fraise: http://perso.fraise.net/ (blog of an American, originally from Oregon, living in Nice)

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French Word a Day [...bringing you a daily thrice-weekly slice of French life]: http://french-word-a-day.typepad.com/

Dispatches from France [written by Vivi, who lived on the east coast of the US, recently married a French man and moved to France]: http://dispatchesfromfrance.blogspot.com/

Superfrenchie [Frenchies’ adventures in French-bashing America]: http://superfrenchie.com/

InsidetheUSA [Blog sur "mes" Etats-Unis, vécus au quotidien] : http://www.insidetheusa.net/

Please share your favorite French related blog with us!

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