Fun Ideas for Foreign Language Classes

I'm always looking for new ideas for foreign language classes, think the subject is pretty flexible, and am particularly interested in Web 2.0 possibilities. I've tried pen-pals, skyping, target language radio stations and blogs, but what else is out there?

Ideas or questions about my experience with different sites/resources?

Tags: foreign, language

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Permalink Reply by Tim Musgrave on May 5, 2010 at 11:16pm

I used Google Wave to encourage peer correction in writing. That was quite successful, but obviously it's still not available to everyone.
I also was hoping that my students would collaborate in writing a story... trouble is the Chinese students I have met just turn their noses up at creating a fiction. They want academic writing for Uni and IELTS exams...

Have you tried Twitter? I've heard a lot about it, but being in China I have no access to the tool :0(

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Permalink Reply by Tim Musgrave on May 5, 2010 at 11:18pm

I've just seen another discussion
http://www.classroom20.com/forum/topics/what-does-interactive-mean
which gives a link to '50 ways to use wiki in the classroom'
Perhaps you can get some ideas from here?

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Permalink Reply by Cameron Foster on May 6, 2010 at 5:11am

This is a low-tech, high-tech exercise I used:

I had my year 8 students make videos explaining grammar points for another year 8 class and vice-versa.

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Permalink Reply by Tim Musgrave on May 6, 2010 at 5:22am

Great idea... did you use a camcorder or a webcam?

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Permalink Reply by Cameron Foster on May 6, 2010 at 5:25am

We used a digital video camera - but I don't think it would have mattered. In terms of learning outcomes and outputs, I thought it was great. I actually didn't 'teach' at all. The kids had to go to the new unit we were about to tackle, find the new grammar points, understand them THEN plan how to explain the use of the phrase in an engaging way.

They had a lot of fun took their understanding of Japanese to a much deeper level.

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Permalink Reply by Juan Pablo Velez Barragan on May 6, 2010 at 7:54am

I like Twitter as an educational tool. Unfortunately, for foreign language, the tweets themselves so often have abbreviations (140 character limit), that I'm not sure how useful it is (more for following links).

Tim, I really like the idea of collaborative story telling or the video presentations, Cameron, but I'm really hoping to find ways to get my students to interact more with native speakers. What do you think of some sort of pen-pal driven (every one writes a paragraph or a video chapter the passes it along) project between students and native speakers in the target language? hard to organize? would native speakers be interested?

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Permalink Reply by Tim Musgrave on May 6, 2010 at 8:07am

I think that's where you'd fall down Juan, getting native speakers interested.
You could set them up in an environment like this where all the teachers would respond... ???
Student writes a message on the noticeboard, someone english or other replies to it... just get them to join a network. (coffeeshopenglish.ning.com would be a good place to start hehehe:0)