Travel iMovie Brochure Projects in the Foreign Language Classroom

Debra Heaton
Lumpkin County High School
French / Spanish Teacher

I am a Foreign Language teacher at Lumpkin County High School in Dahlonega, GA.  I am also the webmaster for our High School website.  It is a very interesting combination I know, but in a small system such as ours, many of us have to do double duty.  This year for my certificate renewal, I decided to get my last two PLU’s by attending the GaETC to see what interesting ways I might be able to integrate technology into the Foreign Language classroom.  I attended many classes and sessions, but one of the most useful classes I took was called “Creating Lively Performance Tasks” which encompassed iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iTunes. We are mainly a Mac school, with only one PC lab.

In the class at GaETC, we created our own DVD project around a science project about matter and energy.  We were given several pictures that we saved in iPhoto and later transferred to iMovie for editing and then finally we saved our project as a Quicktime movie and saved it onto a DVD.   I decided to try this same idea but in the realm of Foreign Languages.  One of the standards in Foreign Language education is knowledge of the culture where the target language is spoken.  I thought that the students could implement some of the same technology that I learned into one of the culture projects that we do in our Foreign Language class.  I plan to do this lesson with my second year students.

In the Foreign Language classroom, the students will work in groups of three to five, gathering information, maps, and pictures about one of the countries where the target language is spoken.  They will ues the internet, books, travel brochures, and other resources to gather their information.  They will save all of their images into iPhoto and write several sentences in the target language about each image, which will be used for the narration of their project.  They must research travel related information, including money exchange, weather, transportation, passport/visa, cultural and geographical information.  Students will then create an iMovie project with the narration to go along with the photos and save it to a DVD to be played for the rest of the class.  In the past, this project was simply done with the students making travel posters with printed images and maps.  They will really enjoy the added dimension of technology and the ease of not having to locate color printers for images.

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