Web 2.0 Test Kitchen...Featuring Yabla!

My latest discovery, thanks to a Google-sponsored ad that appeared on the bottom of the NY Times today is http://french.yabla.com. Okay, so it's a little weird that the interwebs can track my every move, but they did a great job this time.

Yabla features videos in lots of different languages that are fairly short and that star native speakers talking about all kinds of very common topics, such as food, music and fashion. You can watch the video, go backwards, forwards, or repeat the same phrase over and over by clicking "loop." You can even slow down the pace of speech in the video! What an ideal feature to include learners of all levels! What's more, you can choose to read subtitles in French and English. Following the video, you can play a game which closely resembles a Cloze (fill in the blank) activity.

I'm thrilled about the subtitles feature because these videos instantly become not only an excellent resource for listening comprehension, but it can also serve as a reading activity. Indeed, treating it as a reading activity FIRST, and as a listening activity second, would be a great strategy in order to increase aural comprehension. The teacher could transcribe the subtitles onto a worksheet, including supportive pre-reading activities that will lead to vocabulary and comprehension-building. I have been trying to find texts and videos that are relevant to my students' lives and interests and that are at the appropriate level for YEARS! Whereas a high school beginner French student would probably be well suited for a T'choupi book in terms of vocabulary, that would be way to juvenile for their maturity level. At the same time, Le Monde is way beyond them in terms of required vocabulary even if it is appropriate to expect that teenagers would want to read the news. My approach as a teacher has always been that a foreign language has to be fun. So I am thrilled to find videos on Yabla that will challenge my students at just the right level, exposing them to fun themes and native French accents.

Web 2.0 Test Kitchen

One of my goals while I'm home on child care leave with my son is to expand my repertoire as a French teacher. I find web 2.0 activities to be fun, funny, fascinating, and generationally relevant ways of playing with a new language. Project based learning is fully compatible with web 2.0, and there are both large and small activities that can be made using tech, from a French-speaking avatar on Voki to a digital story on VoiceThread.

I recently came across the wiki of Toni Theissen who presented at an AATF conference and who generously published her materials and presentations on her own wiki: tonitheissen.wikispaces.com. She has a fantastic PowerPoint from her 2013 AATF presentation called "Activating Communication" that lists applications that will get your students communicating in the interpersonal, presentational and interpretive modes. I will go through the list and make/share a model of each one she mentions, along with my thoughts on each one.