I've begun the fabulous adopt-an-escargot project in my third-year French class this week, and there is definitely excitement in the air! I love how much this project awakens the interest of all of my students...even those in other levels of French. Today, students in lower levels of French could be found gathered around Escargotville in the corner of my classroom :). It warms my heart to see this.
Today I used the iPad2 in conjunction with this project. Students were asked to write a haiku poem for their dear baby escargot. After reviewing how to write haiku, students used the StoryKit app to create a page which contained a photo of their baby, the text to the haiku they wrote, and a recording of their own voice reading the haiku. Students were able to send the link to me through email, and I was then able to project the pages onto the big screen so that everyone could enjoy seeing and hearing the poems.
Here's a screenshot of one of the pages. You won't be able to hear the audio, but I was able to play the audio on my laptop after students emailed the link to their page to me.
For those of you who may not read French, this baby's name is Bubbles, and the poem says, "Bubbles is very beautiful, she is very smart, Bubbles is the best" (there are some errors in the French).
How was this better than having students stand up to read their poems from a piece of paper, as I've done in past years? The entire class was able to see the text of the poem and also a photo of the snail since it was projected on the screen. This would not have been true if students stood up to present the poems to the class. Also, I notice that students spend a little more time on their pronunciation when they record their own voices. Finally, students are able to observe their own presentation and enjoy the reaction of the class to their original creations. I thought that this activity worked very well, and I was pleased with the results!
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