AATF Technology Commission Web Site of the Month |
| February 2011 by Jemé Sutton |
|
My students love Live Mocha for practicing speaking and listening to French. Students can easily login using an email address and password. There are lessons from beginner to fluent. Students can converse live with people from all over the world who are also.
From the website: “Yabla
French is an online video magazine
for French learners who wish to improve
their language skills. Authentic French
videos include television programs,
music videos, interviews, documentaries,
and travel. Only Yabla French offers
captions in multiple languages,
pitch-correct slow play, integrated
dictionaries and listening exercises.”
This
website has some demo videos available,
but full functionality costs $9.95 per
student with a group license. |
|
Fall 2010 by Jason Bagley |
|
Tired of scrolling down endless lists of bookmarks? Try Symbaloo and get your bookmark list organized with a great visual organizer. Share your webmix with others and add to your list of favorites! This is a great way to distinguish your French sites from your education sites, and so on. |
| May 2010 by Cherie Pettersen |
|
http://www.leszrofs.fr/index.php |
|
Allons découvrir la boulangerie Poilâne à Paris ! http://www.poilane.fr/index.php?lang=fr The great boulangerie Poilâne in Paris, famous in part for its great tasting breads and les punitions, its signature and decadently delicious cookies, offers a wonderful website. Inviting by its design, very user-friendly, and interactive, the website provides useful features and interesting information for online shoppers or curious minds. Moreover, French teachers will discover many possible uses of the site in their classes, particularly in elementary and middle school programs although my college students have enjoyed it too. First, the homepage provides substantial information about the history of la boulangerie, its three locations, and all the different types of bread and cookies made there as well as other products. A quick click of the mouse, and the magic world of la boulangerie Poilâne opens up. As soon as you access the site, you are greeted by an inviting virtual rendition of the storefront of la boulangerie and the sign Ouvert beckons you to enter l’univers de la boulangerie. Inside, the virtual store is interactive. Shelves are stocked with the many products one can purchase. At the center of the image, you will notice le banneton, ready to be filled up with all the goodies. Possible Classroom Activities: You can click and drag to your basket almost all the items displayed on the shelves, but you can also click on a product to find out its price and other information. Once your basket is full, you can see all your purchases and your bill. These various operations within the site can be assigned for reading practice, culture exploration, and connecting to Math. The realm of possible classroom activities continues to open up when you realize that your students can also play a game of Sudoku featuring all the types of bread baked at la boulangerie in lieu of numbers while younger French learners can download a scale model of la boulangerie that they can cut out and build. Visiting this web site is worth while not only because you will think of many different ways to use its content in your French classes but also because it is simply very well engineered, fun to navigate, and a learning experience for you, too. |
| January 2010 by Gay Rawson
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 by Denise Hamwey Wagstaff 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! |
|
November 2009 http://prof-inet.cslaval.qc.ca Prof.INet un site dédié à la télécommunication entre profs. |
|
http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-french/ 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. |
|
March 2009
Paris Daily Photo http://www.parisdailyphoto.com/ 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. |
|
French top 40 music http://top40-charts.com/chart.php?cid=11 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! 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 to get the music video for the song. Most schools block YouTube, so this step must be done at home. You can use the site Keep Vid 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 |
|
Ideas for introducing students to reading The site is called "Apprendre le Français avec l'inspecteur Roger Duflair". It 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. It has also been cited on other French links. |
|
December 2008 |
|
November 2008 by Deb Reisinger 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. |
|
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. |
|
May 2008 by Jean-Marc B. [J.-M. Bassetti] À la découverte de Jean de La Fontaine 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. |
|
April 2008
|
|
La chanson francophone en cours FLE 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. |
|
Useful Website To Teach Directions The Official Website for the City of Paris 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. |
|
December
2007
|
|
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. |
|
|
|
September 2007 |
|
Langwitches.org |
|
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 |
|
http://www.bonjourdefrance.com This Web site'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! |
|
RFI - Journal en français facile http://www.rfi.fr/communfr/dynamiques/podcasting.aspx?rubrique=lffr Try listening to a podcast 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 |
|
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. |
|
December 2006
Polar FLE: Solving a Mystery http://www.polarfle.com/ A neat website for students to practice their language skills by being detectives and solving a mystery. |
|
November 2006 |
|
October 2006 Helpful French links Looking for some links to helpful French websites? Try T-Bob's French links http://www.utm.edu/departments/french/french.html and Jim Becker’s French links: http://www.uni.edu/becker/french31.html |
|
September 2006
Espace Francophone http://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. |
|
Page last updated 03/25/2011 01:17 AM Copyright 2006 TNT Commission. All Rights Reserved. |