Looking for Web 2.0 project for a foreign language novella

When we get back from break, my level 2 German students will be reading a novella with 6 chapters. I'd like them to process what they read and use more technology but I'm not finding a suitable tool.

My original thought was to do a wiki, but I have 2 sections reading this book and one section is quite large.There is not enough content in the 6 chapters to guarantee that all of my students can contribute to the wiki.

I thought about having my students create podcasts pretending to be unnamed passengers on the bus and boat trip that is part of the story. However, most of my students do not have the linguistic ability to create content from this perspective without a tremendous amount of time and help from me. I want them to do their work in German not in English.

We have a Moodle site and I can ask them to answer questions in the forum and respond to other students' comments, but I was hoping for a project that my students would find more interesting.

Any suggestions?

Tags: Foreign, Language, novella, project

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Permalink Reply by Julie Baird on December 26, 2008 at 3:26pm

First, here's the plot: (please remember this is written for students learning German) Karl and his family from Ohio take a vacation in Germany that includes a bus trip to various towns and a boat ride down the Rhine. While having dinner the first night, he sees a woman who looks like an insect (referred to through out the book as "die Insektenfrau" or the insect lady) steal something shiny out of an old lady's purse. He discovers that this old couple has a sister who lives near the Rhine River and the old woman is planning on giving her sister a necklace, a family heirloom, when the boat reaches the Lorelei. The old couple reminds Karl of grandparents and he doesn't have the heart to tell them the insect lady stole their necklace. He wants to get the necklace back for them. Throughout the book, Karl is either looking for the insect lady or the insect lady is hanging around the tour group and threatens Karl. Eventually Karl goes to the police but they tell him that unless the older couple reports the theft, the police can't do anything. The climax of the story is when Karl is standing at the edge of the Lorelei, a steep cliff, and the insect lady threatens to kill Karl for meddling in her affairs. Everything turns out OK. The bad people go to jail and Karl is considered a hero.

Second, I love your ideas for having students create their own WebQuests or an online murder mystery. The virtual suitcase is a fabulous idea. However, I don't know how to do any of those items nor how to present them to my students. Can you lead me to links or tutorials so I can learn?

As for Garage Band, our tech department is strongly allergic to anything Apple. If there is something my students can use that is open source, my tech people would be ecstatic. I do like the idea of creating a song.

For our last novella, I had my students visually represent a chapter using some new piece of technology. Most of the students chose Pixton to represent their chapters. A few used an online movie creator. I want them to go deeper this time and do something that covers most of the book, not just a chapter.

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Permalink Reply by Julie Baird on December 27, 2008 at 6:01am

Exactly. The book is "The Trip of His Life."

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Permalink Reply by Julie Baird on January 1, 2009 at 4:28am

After reading the posts here on wikis and looking at examples, I decided to go ahead and have my students do a wiki. I'm dividing the work into the following categories of the wiki:
1) important vocabulary per unit
2) main character actions and development
3) information about the other characters
4) chapter summary
5) chapter questions
6) locations and settings
7) German customs and products ("products" is one of our standards)

Originally I was worried that there wouldn't be enough content for both of my sections to contribute to the wiki, but I believe I've solved that problem. I'm going to use our Moodle site for the wiki and I can divide the wiki into groups. I have it set up that each group can see the other group's wiki but can only edit their own wiki. I think this will work out. Now I need to figure out the other details such as grading, time, structuring the groups, etc.