AATF Telematics and New Technologies Commission

Web Site of the Month

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Web Site of the Month

January 2010 - by Gay Rawson

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.portaportal.com

Portaportal.com is a book marking site, similar in some respects to Delicious or Diigo.  While these two sites use tags to organize bookmarks, Portaportal allows the user to create folders and subfolders for bookmarks.  This site can be very useful to the teacher, who can easily store bookmarks needed for class activities and organize them in a clear manner.  This saves a lot of time from mistakenly typing URLs during class time!

Here is a link to the  Portaportal page (by Denise Hamwey Wagstaff):

http://guest.portaportal.com/dewagstaff

November 2009 - Prof.INet: http://prof-inet.cslaval.qc.ca  C'est un site qui est dédié à la télécommunication entre profs.
October 2009 - http://fr.skyrock.com/
Check out one of the hottest social networks in France! This site is a
great authentic resource that can be used for all levels! If you are
studying physical descriptions, preferences, opinions on social issues,
or even French Internet slang or abbreviations, skyrock is a great
resource! Students might even enjoy creating their own account to
interact with native speakers! If you plan on using the site in class,
you will want to preview profiles for content that may not be acceptable
at school.

 
March 2009 - Paris Daily Photo

If you can't get to France regularly, check out this cool photo blog. There is a new photo posted every day and photo blogs can be used at any level of French -- from beginning to advanced.

February 2009 - Want a great way to incorporate current popular music into your classes? This method is involved the first couple of times you try it, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll have your students singing along to the most current French hits!

1.  Visit this website for the current top 40 songs in France.

http://top40-charts.com/chart.php?cid=11

2.  Find the lyrics to the song by clicking on the song. There will be a lyrics button. Attention: Pop-ups are common with this site. Now you can print the lyrics for cloze activities or other lyrical analyses or discussion.

3.  Use YouTube www.youtube.com  to get the music video for the song.

4.  Most schools block YouTube, so this step must be done at home. You can use the site Keep Vid http://keepvid.com/  to convert the YouTube video into an FLV format. 

5.  You’ll need to download an FLV player. There are many free choices. I use the free downloadable VLC player. You can get it at http://files.uberdownloads.com/software/video-player/VLC.html

 

 January 2009 - Ideas for introducing students to reading

http://www.polarfle.com/

This is an excellent website for introducing students to reading while at the same time practicing their listening skills and using technology. The site includes a graduated reading text by level (beginner, intermediate, advanced) with relative online activities which are also divided by level. As teachers are pressed for time, the fact that the activities are ready to be used is a plus. In addition, since nowadays many teachers are also lacking the resources due to cutback, having an online reader is excellent.  Furthermore, since the activities are online, technology can easily be applied to the classroom.

The site is called "Apprendre le Français avec l'inspecteur Roger Duflair" and it has also been cited on other French links.

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December 2008 - Ideas for French Language & Culture Advocacy in the US

Is your French program in danger?  French teachers who need support for their school or district's French program should visit
Tennessee Bob Peckham's collection of materials for the advocacy of French programs all across our country.
There are many state-specific resources as well.

http://www.utm.edu/staff/globeg/advofr.shtml
 



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November 2008 - Want to show your students what French people really think?  Send them to TNS Sofres, France's leading opinion and marketing research company: http://www.tns-sofres.com/.  Students can search the site, which offers detailed answers to questions concerning political, economic, and socio-cultural issues .  Recent sondages reveal French attitudes about a variety of topics, from US elections to parental leave to the housing crunch.  Concise graphs and discursive analysis make this site accessible to a variety of L2 learners.

Submitted by Deb Reisinger

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October 2008 -Wikipedia-style language portal. bab.la offers a free collaborative dictionary, language quizzes and a language forum. Users participate and interact with one another rather than just presenting information and material. There are thousands of word translation suggestions, comments and ratings of the language quizzes from the users. The responses and comments to what bab.la offers have been overwhelmingly positive. The dictionaries contain thousands of colloquial expressions as well as very specific words and terms. User can also generate their own quizzes on our website, making language studies an interactive experience.

Here is an example link for the English-French dictionary :
http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-french/.
 


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May 2008 -Jean-Marc B. [J.-M. Bassetti], À la découverte de Jean de La Fontaine, <http://www.lafontaine.net/nouveau-site/index.php>

 À la découverte de Jean de La Fontaine is more than just a transcription of the most famous of the French fabulist’s works. This site is a mine of resources one can use to introduce students from elementary school to college to the pleasures of reading La Fontaine. First, the home page opens every day to a different illustration by Willy Aractingi, the website’s featured artist. Then, if you sign up, you will receive a fable by e-mail every morning. That’s only the appetizer to this gourmet menu. La Fontaine’s entire work is present here: the fables, the tales, his correspondence, theatre, opera, and prose writings. It is easy to search and find fables, either by entering keywords (e.g. cigale, corbeau) in the search box conveniently located in the upper right of the home page, or by navigating the menu buttons: click on “Oeuvre intégrale” (second button) , then choose “Fables” and select one of the search options: volumes, alphabetical order, length of the fables, characters, animals, morality and sayings. Each fable comes with a brief presentation of the story, explanatory footnotes, and links to other fables or external resources. The third button, “Vie, Époque”, is devoted to information on La Fontaine’s personal life and his relationships to famous 17th century figures. The fourth button, “Illustrateurs” is a dossier on the artists who illustrated the fables – Doré, Grandville, Loukine, and Aractingi of course. Also included are textbooks and postcards published in the 19th and 20th centuries. The fifth menu, “A l’ombre de La Fontaine” is devoted to activities and games designed around the fables, as well as to La Fontaine’s followers, links, books, etc. Finally, for those who teach in elementary schools, the last menu is especially designed for children. The quality of the transcription is excellent, which makes this site ideal for school use. The print format allows high quality projection on a screen or a whiteboard. Some fables come with a translation in English, Italian, or Spanish. The author, who discretely signs Jean-Marc B., invites collectors, teachers, students, performers, and ordinary readers to contribute to enriching the site. This is definitely the most complete, user-friendly, and elegant La Fontaine website available for French teachers. by  D. Trudeau

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April 2008 - Looking for that extra something to drive a grammar point home to each of your students? Try Tex’s French Grammar! This interesting site uses creative means to explain virtually every aspect of grammar, even articles! You will find audio for students to listen to, cartoons, MP3 files, and podcasts that highlight each grammar point.

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March 2008 - Always looking for a song to illustrate a grammar point? Go to this website where you can search songs by grammatical point. Lyrics and audio files are ready to be used, thus there is no need to go find them or bring them to class. The lyrics are included with blank spaces that students have to fill out—usually multiple choices are offered. The songs are not the most recent ones, but they are perfect to bring a wide variety in your daily teaching. 

http://platea.pntic.mec.es/7Ecvera/hotpot/chansons/index.htm

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February 2008 - Useful Website To Teach Directions 

The Official Website for the City of Paris, http://www.parisinfo.com, includes several useful and user-friendly links that can help you design real-world activities around the themes of finding your way around Paris, asking for directions, or getting from point A to point B.  From the homepage,  click on Transports & Plans.  There, you will find all the information needed to plan an excursion around the city, using all the means of transportation available.  In particular, check  out the link Se repérer sur un plan.  Click on the map.  Enter a location or a street address in the finder tool.  A secondary map opens along with a list of shops, restaurants, and other businesses in and around that location.  You have the option to see the map, find out how to get there or how to come back from there.  When you want to find out how to get to a specific landmark and/or street address, from another location, a complete itinerary appears, detailing every turn on every street, and of course, using the useful vocabulary that your students can practice.

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December 2007 - http://abu.cnam.fr
If  you are looking for public domain versions of French literature the site ABU: La Bibliothèque Universelle sponsored by the Association des Bibliophiles Universels and the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers (http://abu.cnam.fr ) provides full versions of text that may be downloaded free of charge with no copyright infringement provided that the conditions of use are respected.  In existence since 1993 the site contains approximately 288 works by 101 authors.  The works are catalogued by author or by text. The corpus of texts can also be searched according to key words. The conditions of use documents the accepted uses and specifies how the abu source must be cited in all photocopies and other print versions used in educational settings.  This license or conditions of use form may be printed to keep on file for accreditation and other institutional compliance committees. The home page is clearly organized and includes a contact email: abu@cnam.fr.  Note:  The version of Cyrano de Bergerac is particularly useful for those teachers who show the film starring Gerard Depardieu as it can be used as a support for viewing the film.

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November 2007 - http://www.lepointdufle.net/

Looking for grammar-based Internet activities for your students to complete in the language lab or at home? This easy-to-navigate site has indexed hundreds of other sites from around the globe that you and your students will find useful.  Interactive grammar exercises and explanations of grammar topics are categorized by topic. You can also find many sites related to skills practice, vocabulary and culture.  

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October 2007 -   www.francparler.org/dossiers
Branch out of the US to discover this communauté mondiale des professeurs de français! These dossiers provide both theoretical and practical ideas for injecting new energy into the classroom, from bandes dessinées to blogs.

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September 2007 - http://www.mangerbouger.fr/index2.php

Check out this great site, if you’re studying food, health or nutrition! It’s a national program in France to promote healthier food habits. The site has excellent materials that can be used in class, including advertising used in different media formats.

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May 2007 - www.langwitches.org – Created by Sylvia Tolisano, a foreign language teacher and instructional technologist, this site is an excellent resource for those interested in using technology in language instruction. You’ll find project ideas, tutorials to learn skills like podcasting and digital moviemaking, useful links and more. There are also links to the Langwitches blog, wiki and podcast.

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April 2007 - TV5 Monde: Musique

This site is a wonderful resource for fans of French and Francophone music!  Each week they feature 3 songs with accompanying video, lyrics, and lesson plans.    There is a large selection of archived songs to search from as well. 

For students: http://www.tv5.fr/TV5Site/musique/paroles.php

For teachers: http://www.tv5.fr/TV5Site/enseignants/musique.php

Be sure to also check out the home page for the video jukebox, clips from top 10 songs, and l’invité de la semaine: http://www.tv5.fr/TV5Site/musique/francophone.php

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March 2007 - http://www.bonjourdefrance.com

This website’s description states, “Bonjour de France est un « cyber-magazine » éducatif gratuit. il contient des exercices, des tests et des jeux pour apprendre le français ainsi que des fiches pédagogiques à l’attention des enseignants de français langue étrangère (FLE). ˝

It has a large collection of reading comprehension samples for varying ability levels, with audio recordings and grammar explanations, overt grammar activities, thematic vocabulary lessons, pedagogical tools, idiomatic explanations, collaborative exercises with another school, world news, and games!

The site is a virtual treasure trove of wonderful ideas and tools that will benefit students of all levels and their teachers!

Amusez-vous bien avec ce site merveilleux!

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February 2007 - Try listening to a podcast!

You can visit: http://www.rfi.fr/communfr/dynamiques/podcasting.aspx?rubrique=lffr

And subscribe to the Journal en français facile. You can even go back and access the script: http://www.rfi.fr/lffr/articles/001/script_journal_francais_facile.asp

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January 2007 - Ma France - http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/mafrance/

This incredibly rich interactive video site from the BBC languages web site is completely free. Made for intermediate language learners, it contains 24 theme-based units, each containing a video shot in France, 2 quizzes based on the video, plus games and other activities, vocabulary lists and grammar explanations.

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December 2006 - S
olving a Mystery

A neat website for students to practice their language skills by being detectives and solving a mystery. http://www.polarfle.com/

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November 2006 - Looking for current, interesting, manageable, and authentic reading material for your students? Then check out this site that holds a host of challenging and interesting topics!

www.lesclesjunior.com  is a site based on the popular news magazine Les Clés de l’Actualité Junior. This site has a host of articles that are of manageable length, are challenging, and most of all, interesting for our students! The site is divided into categories with new articles every day. There is even a search feature that allows users to find articles that go back several years. Teachers will even be happy to know that there is a photo of the day, with French captioning, that can be the stimulus for a class discussion or bell-ringer activity. This website is very thorough and even includes a section for the teacher with many more educational activities that are already created and easy to use!

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October 2006 - Looking for some links to helpful French websites? Try:

T-Bob’s French links: http://www.utm.edu/departments/french/french.html

Jim Becker’s French links: http://www.uni.edu/becker/french31.html

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September 2006 - Espace Francophone www.espacefrancophone.org/

This website was created and is maintained by the Cultural Service of the Consulate General of France in New Orleans. One of the wonderful resources provided by the site includes a variety of French videos and media programming that can be downloaded free of charge [many come with prepared exercises and activities]. You can even subscribe to a podcast so that their programs can be downloaded automatically to your computer. Information on France, Francophonie, Louisiana and Immersion is also available.

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Page last updated 02/08/2010 09:13 AM

Copyright 2006 TNT Commission. All Rights Reserved.