Bye -bye Orange

Our free web space is now full at Orange, where Absloutenglish-972 was born and grew.
The site will start a new life after five years here with its own domain name

NOW AT
www.absolutenglish.org

BAC 2007: Terminales ES

The 2007 list of texts and downloads for the BAC (2d gp oral exam) in Tle ES is now online (just in case you need them from July 2 to July 4th)

Cyber-langues 2007: Perpignan

Cyber-langues is a French organization of language teachers who use ICT in their teaching practices. It organizes a 3-days' meeting each August in a different city of France, or even outside France.

More about Cyber-langues 2007 here:
http://www.cyber-langues.asso.fr/



This year's Cyber-langues will take place in Perpignan. Come and join us this summer if you teach a foreign language, use ICT and speak French (August 21st- August 23rd).


I will be presenting Stock Potatoes , which I have been using on the local network this year with 4 classes in the multimedia room of my school (using EasyPhp). The results are encouraging. I use it to train and evaluate reading and listening skills.
The students just love to work on it. They usually get good or excellent results if we compare them to the scores they would get in a more traditional classroom situation (teacher/students vs students/computer). The student is willing to do the activity (and to do it again and again if possible), he or she is more likely to concentrate on his/her work, for a longer period of time. The teacher immediately gets the students' scores.

Last but not least, I can spend less time marking reading and listening tests and spend more on writing tasks or essays :-)



Teleworking on my Stock Potatoes

I have a dream

HERE is a multimedia presentation of Martin Luther King's famous speech "I have a dream" .
This smil file (synchronized multimidia integration language) synchronizes the video, the sub-titles in English as well as other illustrative images and texts.


CLICK ON THE SCREEN SHOT TO OPEN THE PRESENTATION

You will need Real Player to open this presentation

Download Real Player if necessary.

What's up?

It's such a long time since I last wrote anything on the blog. It's high time I kept you informed of the news, past and coming events.

I had a great time last summer in France visiting my family and meeting my cyber-colleagues at Cyber-langues in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. I made a short presentation of Stockpotatoes on that occasion, but unfortunately, the new school where I was appointed last september is not connected to the Internet, and the multimedia room doesn't work anyway, so I cannot use the platform with my students.

I have developped more lesson plans and activities using my laptop and video projector instead. So I carry about 5 bags at school: my handbag (a typical woman's messy handbag), my school bag with all my papers, my laptop, one bag with the video-projector, and another one with my speakers and wires. I have had back problems, as you can easily imagine, but fortunately, I found a good doctor to fix this!

I really enjoy my new school, Montgérald high-school in Le Marin, the students are nice and well behaved.
The view of the bay is absolutely wonderful. I found this perso site that will help you picture the setting (although the site and photos is not recent).

So, What's new in class?

A lesson plan on the school rules : I found an interesting American video from the 50s entitled : "school rules, how they help us "and decided to use it in class as part of my first lesson plan this year with the 5th and lower 6th formers. The whole lesson plan is based on the Common European Framework ("cadre européen commun" in French) and can be download here [.doc].

We are currently working on Immigration to the USA: we started with a video entitled "immigration ", from the Prelinger archives. We watched the first 2'45'', without sound first to identify the theme, the countries and revise nationalities, then with sound to check answers. We finished with a fill-in the blanks activity where all geographical terms (countries, nationalities, cardinal points, regions, continents, etc. had been erased.)

We are now working on West Side Story, with a study of the first scene to set the background and context and the song "America" to analyse the contrasting views of the immigrants.
I still have to gather all my documents into one to share them

To conclude, I'm still working on the Academy's site here and on a new Absolutenglish (I've almost used all my space) but this may take a while, or even longer.

Slavery Project 2006

The 2006 slavery project at "le Lycée la Jetée, Martinique (French West Indies) is coming to an end, it's high time I allowed you, dear visitors, to see what my seconde B wrote (5th form B). The project started on a nice day out visiting a former sugar plantation on the North-Caribbean coast of the island (April 7, 2006)and ended today with the last test based on an extract from Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The blog2la2b is the teacher and the students' writing area. The students' posts will be evaluated for this academic year's last term.

Note that the class work in the "class log" section of the blog is written in French (the students' native language) by the teacher for all parents and students to understand clearly what was done in class.

Jacqueline Julius joins the blogosphere

Nathalie Cadot, an English teacher at "Jacqueline Julius" junior high school in Fort-de-France has recently created a blog for her students which focuses on the skills as described in the Common European Framework. Join them and see how my colleague has already adapted the CEF and portfolio to her teaching practice.

Super Size Me

I was looking forward to offering my students and visitors more activities online based on video.

A new series of activities adapted from a CBS video news report on Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me is online here.

eStat.com

Each time I take a look at the statistics for my site, I am amazed to notice that an average of 200 people visit absolutenglish-972 every day and that they connect from all around the world



And just for the pleasure to travel now and again, I wouldn't unsuscribe from estat.com (in spite of the ads on the main page).

Be my Valentine

Get ready for a wonderful Valentine's day next February 14! Study a poem by Robert Burns "Love is like a red red Rose".

Robin

You left too early, we will miss you very much.
You were so generous, so devoted, so passionate, so understanding, so funny.
You left too early, we had so much to learn from you.
Robin, I wish you all the best where you are.
Your students think you're gone because the angels needed a musician and a great English teacher.
It may be so, but nobody can replace you down here.