Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves,
or we know where we can find information upon it.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

What a Statue! is a set of material that incorporates ICT into foreign language learning. It is aimed at the 2nd cycle of ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) and gives learners an opportunity to learn about the world around them. The focus is not on the language itself but on the use of the language as a means to widen the cultural and personal background of the learners.

The material provides a set of stimulating activities that involve the learners in solving problems and gathering information at each stage.

The learners' final product consists of an individual oral presentation of their statue, which they will have created by following the sequence of the learning tasks and which will include description, location, history, etc. Throughout the material the learners are provided with guidelines for the production of PowerPoint slides which will support their presentation.


Objectives

• To understand instructions to carry out the tasks.
• To write short texts, organising ideas and information coherently.
• To understand and produce simple oral and written descriptions and narrations.
• To obtain specific information from electronic sources in various formats: text, image, sound.
• To organise one's own work efficiently and to use supplementary learning material in web format.
• To use electronic tools, Winword and Power Point, for the production of outcomes.
• To develop a topic and to present the information orally, in an organized way, with the support of Power Point slides.
• To respect the opinions of teachers and other students.
  

Content organization
The situation

The torch of the Statue of Liberty has disappeared and the learners have to help Liberty to recover itl. Learners will follow a series of clues that will guide them on a virtual trip to find and talk to other statues, the Statue of Liberty's "colleagues". When the torch is found, the trip will end with a summit meeting of the statues, where they will decide on the best location for the torch.

The material is structured as follows:

• The introduction, Invitation to a Trip, where the main characters of the story are presented.
• The presentation of the situation around which the story revolves, We have a Problem!
• Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3 contain a series of tasks with questions that lead to the solution of the problem.
  Each step is organised in the following sections:
  • Search: tasks to locate the statues, which often imply web search. These tasks are interelated and have to be completed in order to go on.
  • Performance: oral and written interaction and production associated with the development of the story.
  • Diary: a space to collect what learners have produced in the Performance section. The tasks include the production of different types of text: dialogue, narration, instructions, minutes, etc.;
  • Presentation: guidelines for the students to produce Power Point slides that will in the end support the oral presentation of their statue.
  • Supplementary tasks: language activities to revise concepts that the learner may need in order to complete the Presentation. The learner can decide whether to do these or not.
• Final Step where the learners have to solve the problem. The different sections, Performance, Diary and Presentation are of the same type as in the previous steps (Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3); Problem solving sets out a situation that leads to the solution of the problem.

The activities can be automatically corrected, although, in order to make it more challenging for the students to find the answers, the Clue button has in general not been included. Some multiple choice and cloze exercises have a button that allows the learners to view all the questions. It is advisable to use this option if the printed version of the activity is to be used.

Answer keys for all the tasks: didactic sequence, skyscrapers, and the supplementary tasks for Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3. These can either be printed or the URLs can be provided for learners to access them.

Due to the complexity of the navigation through the material (explained below), it is advisable that the learners print the activities once they have completed them:

• to keep track of the work they have done, and
• to know where they have to start working again.

In order to avoid typing long URLs, the main page contains an access icon to a contents map that leads directly to the activities, without having to go through the itinerary that has already been completed.

Besides, to keep trach of the activities the learners have completed, the level of difficulty, and any comments, they can use the Progress sheet provided.

Navigation

The contents web pages corresponding to the Steps, which you have just seen, have been modified in the students' material in order to make navigation through the tasks easier. Thus, the initial page corresponding to each Step contains two hipertext links: the icon of the section that has to be completed, which is highlighted in blue, and the bottom forward arrow.

Both links lead to the task that has to be completed. The rest of sections have no active elements.

When the learner has completed a task and returns to the Step index page, this task is in grey and the one that has to be completed next is highlighted in blue.

The sections Diary and Presentation are highlighted together because each link opens a document, Word or Power Point. The bottom forward arrow links to the Suplementary tasks.

The Supplementary tasks have not been highlighted because they are optional and are not interelated. They are active after the student reaches the Presentation section. The bottom forward arrow links to the next Step.

Resources

The completion of the tasks requires multimedia computers with access to the Internet and the following software:

• Microsoft Explorer
• Microsoft Winword
• Winzip
• Microsoft Power Point
• Paint Shop Pro
• Quick Time

The web pages are best viewed with Microsoft Explorer and a screen configuration of 1024 x 768 pixels.

To complete the Diary and Presentation sections, the learners can use the sample Winword and Power Point sample documents that are provided.


Reference for evaluation

• 4teachers
• Power Point Rubric
• Paragraph Writing Rubric
• Presentation Rubric
• Writing Rubric
• General Rubric Generator