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.

Oh Where, Oh Where Should my Projects Go?

This week consisted of one of my most monstrous of projects.  I use a Microsoft program called Photo Story where students narrate pictures of their family members in order to practice their vocabulary and grammar.  We spend several days in front of computers in the computer lab.  Students spend days lining up their photos and recording their voice as they describe the ages, likes and dislikes and give descriptions of their family members.  Then, render them into videos.

However, when students participate in a project such as this, the conundrum occurs when it is time to submit their work.  In the past, our school had a large amount of space tied to their student ID. While it was a bit tedious, in order to grade the projects, I would find their folder on our shared drive and find their project. This meant that I had to be at school on the network.  This school year, in order to save server space, the district did away with the "Student  Docs".  At first, it sent me into a panic, how in the world am I going to grade 70 projects if they can't save them on our shared drive?  No way was I going to accept a flash drive from each student.  Can you imagine the mess? This problem ended up being a blessing in disguise.  It forced me to investigate the many different ways of submitting to the cloud.

Our school does not have a Classroom Management System for each teacher.  Something like Blackboard or Moodle offer very easy ways for students to submit electronic assignments, but I don't have those at my fingertips and I can't afford to buy them.  Two other free options are Schoology or Edmodo.  My students use Edmodo on a regular basis.  Edmodo offers up to 100MB in size for each student submission.  That was plenty of space for these projects.  But, in order for the students to turn it in, there is a "process" that they had to follow.  I wanted to avoid the issue of "I can't remember my log in" or "How do I submit to an assignment".  While Edmodo offers what I needed, it was too labor intensive.  I wanted something easier.

At last, after a weekend of searching, my husband came across "Drop It To Me".  This ended up being the answer to this frustrating problem.  With Drop It To Me, I set up an account so that when students submit their assignment to me, it goes into a Dropbox folder on my Dropbox account.  Teachers, if you don't have a Dropbox account, you need one.  My account has 14 GB of space because I send students invites in order to expand my available space. (Smart, huh!)  I put a link unto my website,  (Which isn't even necessary because the URL for Drop It To Me is very simple.) and my students uploaded their projects.  Important Note:  I had my students save as "classperiod_lastname"  For example, my file, if I were in 5th hour, would be 5_Burton.wmv--for a Photo Story movie. Since I had students save this way, their files appeared in class order alphabetically.  Awesome!! I could walk around with my IPad, open the Dropbox app and show students immediately that I had received their project. Double Awesome!!  It is important to note that there is a file size limit of 75MB, but for these projects that was plenty of space.

Here is a link to the instructions that I gave my students:
Submission Instructions with Screen Shoots

Now, I need to sit down and grade some projects!  Which I can do with my Ipad on my couch, thanks to Dropbox!