Voyage Coetail

This is the end of Course 3 already and that was my favourite course so far as this one was very practical and fun too! My takeaways from Course 3 were the Presentation Zen and the digital story telling. Perfect to use in language classroom! Presentations: I have gathered a lot of student friendly resources to teach the design principles and the CARP principles (found on Jocelyn Sutherland blog) which make me like presentations more now! Digital storytelling: The one I made for the week 4 was the little push I needed to finally jump into the water of video editing. I thought it would take forever not only to edit but also to film the students at work (meaning having some “visual “ activities). I really like the digital story telling as it can be shown to the parents and they can really get a sense of what’s happening in the classroom and hear their children speaking a foreign language. As I have already explained in a previous post, digital storytelling would be such a powerful t...

I don't like presentations I don’t like presentations. For me it means a speaker with a monotonous voice reading slides. Actually it’s exactly what Don McMillan explained in his talk “Life after death by power point” in the funniest way ever! [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpvgfmEU2Ck[/embed] Slides presentations are a cause of too many distractions for me. I never know if I should focus on the speaker or on the slides. Presentation Zen It was my idea of a presentation before reading the Presentation Zen blog of Garr Reynolds. Although those ideas and methods of presenting aren’t new, they are for me. And yet most of the principles and methods explained are obvious. In his book “ Presentation Zen, Simple ideas on presentation design and delivery ", Garr Reynolds described six principles under the SUCCES acronym. The six principles are relatively easy to incorporate into messages—including presentations and keynote addresses—but most people fail to use them. Why? The au...

Here is my picture! flickr photo shared by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license What can you see? I bet you’ll answer it’s Italy at night from space. Wrong! That’s the generic of Universal studios according to my Grade 4 students. How disappointed they were when they realized they weren’t to watch a movie but we would talk about this picture. First thing first! As I didn’t make any connection between this photo and the generic, we watched the generic to see the difference between the two. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFa_Lbqgun4[/embed] Visual Literacy strategy in action Then, we went back to our picture. I showed them this picture as we are in the cultures unit and I wanted them to learn about Europe and the European Union. (NOTE: Luxembourg is really in the middle of Europe). I really enjoy this kind of activity where the students do the questions and answers, when they can freely express themselves. Here are some quotes: “It...

flickr photo shared by gato-gato-gato under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license What is visual literacy? What’s all the excitement about it? Communications, and visuals in particular, is a field that I’m really fond of. I’m a typical visual learner. I need to see in order to understand, remember, learn… As a French teacher, I use images a lot. I can’t teach without visuals, pictures, drawings or symbols ( The Noun project is one of my favourites). Two years ago, I took a “Speech and Language support for 5-11s” course. The aim is to encourage children’s communication skills. I learned that studies suggest that our minds are organised and more prepared to receive information through the visual route rather than any other sense and that over 50% of messages are conveyed through non-verbal communication. I also learned that our memory works much better when we use a multi-sensory approach. John Medina explained that and much more in Brain Rules . Why is visual literacy important? N...