http://www.merlot.org:80/merlot/ A search of MERLOT materials Copyright 1997-2013 MERLOT. All rights reserved. Thu, 23 May 2013 04:36:03 PDT Thu, 23 May 2013 04:36:03 PDT http://www.merlot.org:80/merlot/images/merlot.gif http://www.merlot.org:80/merlot/ 44 34 http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=486088 In this cooperative learning activity, intermediate-level students of French will work in small groups on a language project concerning Alzheimer's Disease and the effect that it has on caregivers. The project begins mainly as a listening activity, with pre-listening, listening and post-listening segments provided by the Radio France Internationale Langue Francaise website. The students will work together to get the general idea of the broadcast and then refine their understanding of a radio broadcast that treats the Alzheimer's topic. After the group works through various printed activities supplied by RFI on its website, including the joint creation of a French language poster on Alzheimer caregivers, the students will reflect on their heightened awareness about the topic as well as the impact the group activity had on the development of their listening skills in French. The culminating activity will happen in a class discussion forum.This material has been developed through Merlot as part of its collaboration with the SERC Pedagogic Service. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=486094 In this listening exercise, students in intermediate-level French will work in pairs on comprehension exercises related to a recording of a young girl describing life with her autistic younger brother. The short audiotext at the Radio France Internationale Langue Francaise website is accompanied by self-correcting multiple choice questions designed to check listening comprehension. Students will listen to the RFI audiotext and come to consensus on the correct answers to the comprehension questions. The listening activity will be followed by a teacher-facilitated whole class discussion of the effect of autism on family members. This cooperative learning activity has been developed through MERLOT as part of its collaboration with the SERC Pedagogic Service. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=486118 In this lab exercise, students of intermediate-level French will watch a short video on brain plasticity from the universcience VOD collection online. Students will watch the video several times and then, in pairs, they will construct a summary of its contents with the aid of a gap fill exercise and a word bank. Students will then recount the video contents in French, in their own words. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=486112 In this Interactive Lecture Demonstration, students of intermediate-level French will attempt to predict the content of articles on the Health Science pages of French newspapers by reading headlines on the Newsmap website. They then read the full-length articles and reflect on their actual content. According to the author of Newsmap: "Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way, users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article. Newsmap also allows users to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business." The present activity allows students to hypothesize about content by first reading headlines and then predicting the content of the accompanying articles.