La chasse au trésor

From this week’s reading and other links and materials, I am learning that blogging is the most efficient way to communicate when teaching online. Like Jim Sullivan says, blogging can take different shapes and forms, but it opens communication between blogger(s) and commentator(s).

I am a visual person so my favorite form of blogging is through videos. I love YouTube and could spend hours there looking for teaching materials and even for news and old, forgotten, interviews, movies, and songs. There is a wealth of materials for learning French on YouTube and TeacherTube and I would be a much less effective instructor without these tools even in my face-to-face class.

This Spring, I will experience online teaching for the first time, but I think that I will soon become a very big fan of discussion boards. I think they are also a form of blog, a micro-blog, and can have almost the same function as Twitter and Facebook in Blackboard.

Learning French requires frequent interaction and communication in the target language. Students will have little opportunity to reflect on the course content, and they will be using their time to put into practice what they are learning. However, I think it will be important for them to keep a blog or journal and write a little at a time about themselves in French. This way, by the end of the course, they can look back and see that they are able to talk about basic topics in French.

I liked Ko and Rossen’s use of the expression treasure hunt. Even though they recommend that we not send students on a treasure hunt, I am going to use this title to design activities where students will indeed go on treasure hunts and get points for whoever can find the answers first. This will be a great team group activity.

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