Souffler - a breath of fresh air

Using powerpoint triggers and scrolling text to set up a quiz

Here is a video to demonstrate how I created the triggers to activate the scrolling text in my earlier post

Right click on this link and open it in a new browser window.

Using_triggers_and_scrolling_text_to_set_up_a_quiz.swf (12759.1K)

Christmas in France : a quiz using scrolling text

Updates A colleague kindly pointed out that there were a couple of errors in the text of the powerpoint which I have now corrected in the download file. Slide 34 'Kir Royale' not just Kir and slides 49 and 55 'treize' for 'trieze' a typo.

I have also added a simplified version of the same quiz with a few new elements

Download Christmas_in_France_information_easier.ppt (5149.5K)

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Following on from my earlier post on using a scrolling text in powerpoint, here is a French Christmas quiz which was kindly shared by a colleague on the Yahoo Mfl resources forum (which by the way will save you as a language teacher hours of time as colleagues here are very generous with time, support and bags of free resources).

I have adapted it so that all of the questions appear on the slideshow but they only appear when the text the pupils are studying has disappeared and the questions then appear as scrolling text across the bottom of the screen. It puts a time pressure on the pupils to read the text, focus on the key detail and anticipate the kind of questions they might be asked. I played it with pupils working as a pair but in competition with each other. They had to write the answers down and after every 3 or 4 slides we would check the answers as a class.

This worked very well with pupils in yrs 5 and 6 at a primary school and I am sure you could adapt it to work with older groups, perhaps putting more of the slides into French.

There is too much material here for one lesson so you may need to shorten it to suit your needs. The later slides do include some ideas on how to exploit the 'find the French for ...' type of question.

Watch a video demonstration of how it works on this video here.

Right_click_to_watch_or_download_ Noel_France_news_ticker_quiz_video.swf (9243.4K)

You can download the powerpoint here. If you are prompted to allow macros when you open it, you can block them as there are none attached to this powerpoint. I have no idea why this message pops up! An annoyance of ppt 2003 ...

Download Christmas_in_France_information.ppt (5030.0K)

Here is a Slideshare link to give you an idea of the content but Slideshare will not demo a preview of the animated scroll bar questions or triggers I have used.

 Christmas in_france_information

I hope I can put up a video explaining a bit more how these features are created. For now you can simply play around with the ideas. Copy any of the slides whose features you want to use in any other presentation you are working on and adapt the pictures and text for your own ends.

You could use these ideas to get pupils focusing on and interacting with any topic you are teaching at any level across the curriculum so please feel free to share this post with other colleagues on your schools. You can use the "Tell a friend" widget to the left to pass a link on.

Have fun!

PowerPoint Heaven - The Power to Animate - Tutorials

I'm posting a link to a page on a site called 'powerpoint heaven'.

I thought this scrolling text idea was a neat way of adding a visual effect to a teaching presentation. I am going to post an example of how you can modify this to create a simple set of questions to encourage pupils to take in information and engage with your slides. I will be adapting a Christmas quiz I downloaded from the yahoo mfl resources forum. That's coming up later on today.

"Tutorial on creating a Scrolling Ticker In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a Scrolling News Ticker which can be placed at the bottom of the slide for you to display any news and information."

via pptheaven.mvps.org

A French Christmas Carol

Anyone who inadvertently lands upon this blog as they wander the net will know that I have been banging on about language teachers and singing. I have mentioned that every UK language teacher ought to sign up for a FREE account with the Sing Up website. I thought I would put up today's post to convince anyone who hasn't yet done so.

4 times a year, Sing Up send out a really useful magazine to subscribers, one of whose features is an accompanying CD with a selection of the music freely available to download from their website.

In the Summer 2010 issue, there was this useful article about how to adapt some of this material for your own use. you could apply this to all the other posts I have put up about building a bank of your favourite backing tracks to support your teaching. For example in the current winter issue there is a full arrangement of Queen's "We are the the Champions". You get the backing track of this for free. 

The CD with the 2010 Summer issue included a beautiful 3 part African lullaby called Souallé. I took the 3 part melody, used the free musical backing track and put French lyrics to the tune to create a 3 part French Christmas Carol, "Dors,dors,dors petit fils"

With apologies for the recording quality and my own less than perfect vocals, here is what the vocal track sounds like in French

Download Dors Dors Dors French vocals.mp3

Here are the lyrics. The colour coding indicates where the text is repeated on the harmonies. A download link to the text is below.

Download Dors dors petit fils lyrics

Download Dors dors petit fils with english translation

Below you have the 3 vocal harmony parts with download links : the 3 backing track harmony parts : and finally the full backing track

i) the top vocal melody

Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils vocals top melody vocal.mp3 (3411.3K)

ii) the middle vocal melody

Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils vocals middle melody vocal.mp3 (3411.3K)

iii) the bass vocal melody

Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils vocals bass melody vocal.mp3 (3411.3K)

Here are the 3 backing track melodies

i) the top backing melody

Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils top melody.mp3 (3478.7K)

ii) the middle backing melody

Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils middle melody.mp3 (3478.7K)

iii) the bass backing melody

Download Dors Dors Dors petit-fils bass melody.mp3 (3478.7K)

And finally the full backing track

Download Dors Dors Dors petit fils backing.mp3 (6952.3K)

If you think teaching this yourself might be too much of a challenge, why not pass it over to a music teacher and see if they couldn't use it?

Alternatively try and just use two parts, the main melody and the middle melody.

Let me know if you use this in school. You can send me links to audio/video recordings of any performances in the comments boxes as I moderate all comments and will not publish any links unless expressly asked to do so.