In the move to remote learning this Spring of 2020, it is tough to make lessons equitable when some students may experience technology and connectivity issues. In this blog post I want to show an example of how to keep lessons simple. I will share with you a low-tech yet online solution for providing students with lessons for a week.
My example is a set of slides on Google Drive that serves as lessons that students can work on independently. While the lessons include links to video clips, everything the students have to do is contained in the slides. There aren’t any exterior apps that are used and therefore difficulty remembering usernames and passwords or issues with returning work to the teacher.
You can give each student their own set of these slides by posting to your school management system. They write their answers to the questions right into their own copy of the slides and return them to you in the school management system.
By supplying you with an example of a week of lessons, you can then adapt it to use the technology that you know your students can handle. For example, you can take the videos and post them to EdPuzzle or Fluentkey and make the questions a quiz. You can ask the questions in the lessons on Flipgrid or Voicethread and have students post back to you videos of their answers. You can take my vocabulary list and make a Quizlet out of it so that students can quiz themselves on the vocabulary before doing the activities. Or, with this content, you can have your students respond through a Google Form or a quiz on Canvas. It is my hope that you make this your own but that you also consider using my low-tech version so that it is as simple as possible for your students.
In addition, this lesson has possibilities for live teaching, if that is available to you. The discussion questions that I ask can be questions that students ask and answer. If you use Zoom, you can create breakout groups of four and ask students to ask each other the questions. And, when you come back together into the large group, students can complete a Zoom poll to reflect on their use of the target language. Another option is if you run a live class you can share your screen and go over the slides with the students.
Here is a link on Google Drive to the lessons made around the opening sequence of the film Avril et le Monde Truqué. The theme of these lessons is Science and Innovation. I hope you will find them useful.
I would love to post another set of lessons for you in the near future. To that end, please tell me in the comments what works for you and what would be helpful changes. Thank you.
Resources for the lessons:
French Review Article
Canberra Alliance Française Packet for the Film
Images from the Film
mmemoghtader.com 
8 responses to “Simple remote learning lessons for French class”
Wow, what an amazing piece of work you have here! Nice job!
Thanks! I really hope it can be helpful to others.
That was really great. My school year ends this week, but it gives me some ideas if we start the next school year with remote learning. Thank you!.
Thank you! It feels to me that the more sharing we all do the better we will all be!
As always, superb work! Thanks so much – I’m sharing this with our French teachers. What proficiency level would you say this is for?
Great! I hope it will prove helpful. It is for Intermediate Low.
Hi, I’ve been browsing your website and I can’t thank you enough for all the wonderful ideas and resources! I see that in this post you mentioned sharing Google slides to your LMS and assigning each student their own copy of the presentation. I am thinking about this for my classroom for the fall, but I’m curious which LMS you use?
Google Classroom, but I think it would work on any one. Thanks for the question.