Les Voyageurs - A Short Google Slide Show

Thursday, March 31, 2016

As part of a final assignment in the IICT additional qualification course I have been working on for the past few months, we have been asked to create a digital portfolio highlighting a selection of our coursework submissions. One task involved creating a 30-minute slide show presentation for our class. The presentation had to reflect expectations from the Ontario Curriculum and as such, I chose the following expectation for grade 6 Core French:

Intercultural Awareness: using information from oral French texts, identify French-speaking communities in eastern, western, and northern Canada; find out about aspects of their cultures; and make connections to personal experiences and their own and other communities (ie. listen to historical accounts about the voyageurs and discuss their significance in the development of Canada as a nation; listen to songs such as “C’est l’aviron” and identify their significance to Métis and other French Canadian communities)

Using images I procured by completing a Google image search directly from within the Google slides app, I was able to add visual appeal thanks to images that Google determined to be labelled for commercial reuse with modification. I also made sure to link to the web-based sources that I paraphrased. The slide show also includes an embedded YouTube video of the song "M'en revenant de la jolie Rochelle," also known as "C'est l'aviron," as performed by Manuel Dauvin, Luc Dauvin and Jim Anderson. This is one of my favourites for which I created a cloze activity last year and one that lends itself quite well to giving an introductory lesson on how to play the spoons. It also means I get to pull out my fancy set of cuillères that I nabbed at the Richard Cyr booth at the One of a Kind Show a few years back. The final slide includes a hyperlink to a voyageurs themed vocabulary Quizlet.