Ok, Students, Today we are going to France!

In earlier posts, I posted about my Project Based Learning unit that I did with my French 2 students.  I decided to do it again last year. But, as most teachers do, I took the things that I learned from last year and improved the unit.  We started the unit yesterday with an activity where students "went to France."  I gave the students the web site of the school that we have partnered with on this unit.  We have a school in Lille, France who has agreed to help out, and a school in Versailles, France. Each group was given an IPad and I pretty much just let them go.  I required them to do three things: 1.  Figure out the name of the high school (this is level 2 and they were looking at website that is entirely in French, that task is a little more challenging than you might think)  2. Find it on Google Maps or Google Earth and look around, then pinpoint the location the city in which the high school is found on a map of France.  3.  They had to complete a Venn Diagram comparing our high school to the one in France.

Let me just say, using IPads in the classroom is so cool.  I have a little jealousy for those teachers who get to teach in a school where all students come the class with an IPad.  I use my IPad daily for the management of the classroom, but using it for instruction is beyond anything that a textbook can offer. The ease of using a tablet so that all the students in the group could see the terrain of the city where their partner school is located makes the learning experience so exciting and engaging.  Of course, many of the students had the website pulled up on their phone, as well, in order to compare their findings.  They were engrossed in looking around the community where the school is located.  The used Google Eartth to look at the windows of the buildings, the cars that were parked near by, and even the graffiti that they found on buildings that were near the high school.  Each group found different and unique things and it was fun to watch them so enthusiastically involved in learning.