Explain Everything

We are almost done with our Explain Everything  projects.
Here is the outline:

1. Pick a topic you like or feel passionate about.
2. Choose a noun connected to the topic.
3. Choose three adjectives and a verb that are connected to this noun.

Examples: gardening - the garden, big, colourful, fresh, grow

By using the French words, create a short presentation on Explain Everything. Use pictures, pronounce these words correctly and record your presentation in a movie format.

Some students are using other apps combined with EE, like iMovie or Garage Band. Soon we'll have some of the projects to check out.

Recording on Book Creator

If someone walks around our school building on a Friday, might be able to see students huddled over iPads in remote corners of the hallway, in the paper room, on the monkey bars, stretched out on the lawn...just like every time kids are enthusiastically working on projects with technology. The surprising part is that the careful observer would hear French sentences murmured into those iPads, and the kids are not students of the Francophone school that we share our building with - but our very own Anglophone students.

They have been working on their Francophone celebration projects for months: selecting pictures, writing and typing in French sentences, using dictionaries, editing, correcting the texts, listening to the French pronunciation - and finally, recording their own, first shaky, but later increasingly confident voices. We are very proud of them, they came very far since September!

Here is a showcase of their work:

Festival Franco Ontarien

Carnaval de Quebec

I need to give special recognition to the second project, made by one of our special needs students. Fantastic job!

An Old Project - Our School Life in Comic Life

I realized that I had never uploaded any final projects of the school vocabulary. Remember, this was an assignment in November, when the students took photos of items around school and created a collage in Comic Life. Here is an example:

And here is the movie version of this project, with French subtitles included:

This was a project at the beginning of the school year in order to refresh the students' vocabulary and trying something new with technology. They enjoyed running around taking photos of school supplies and each other!

French voices

Some of the students completed the pages about the Francophone festival before spring break. Here are some videos about them listening to the app, then how they read the same text.
First, I had trouble to upload the original videos - maybe they were too big in size -, so I had to edit and cut them.

The students are listening to the French voice over, then they are trying to pronounce the sentences the  same way. Of course their pronunciation is not perfect, but we all know that this is a learning process. Our goal is to expose them to the French sounds over and over again.

The main idea behind using the text to sound feature is that the students can hear how their own composition sounds. They get a one-to-one experience with the iPads, which would be very hard to provide with just one teacher, considering how limited our time is each week.

Provinces and territories - on Book Creator

Students in grade 5 have been working on the Canadian provinces and territories. They researched their assigned province in small groups, collected and organized all information, then designed one - or sometimes several - pages in Book Creator.

Points to consider:

• all pages had to be the same size and orientation in order to fit together
• several group members realized that coordinating font and design ideas would lead to a harmonious outcome
• students who finished their pages got to work on nonfiction text features (cover, table of contents)

During the project the students practiced several strategies to learn how to work with a new form of technology, also, it was another chance to do research, take notes, use their artistic skills and collaborate. 

New Brunswick
Ontario
Newfoundland and Labrador

Video Blog

In this video, Clara and Sabine are describing the process of making their project about a Francophone festival.

Le Voyage et la Francophonie

Ashton is trying to find the best background for his book

Every Friday the students are working on their French project. Each team is assigned a francophone cultural event or festival in Canada.

Seoha and Anya deep in research

Abby is reading information about Winterlude in Ottawa

Emma and Evan are done with the 'table des matières'...

...and Mme Tedesco is checking it for them.

This page is almost done!

The students' level of French is not high enough to be able to conduct the research in French (it's a core French class after all!), therefore they are reading the information in English. They are using a template to enter the information about each festival, which they are typing into the Book Creator pages they had created.

Spelling is challenging, since the spell check function is set for English.

They are using online and traditional dictionaries.

It's great to see their enthusiasm and creativity. And I learnt something new: one of them showed me how to find the French accents on the iPad's keyboard: you hold the key of the closest vowel, then carefully slide your fingertip onto the right letter that shows up. I didn't know that!

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