Apr 26 2012
Avidly not re-inventing the wheel
In doing the webquest for this week, a fact became clear to me that I hadn’t considered before, and I must say I was very pleased to learn it. I am working on a literature course at the 300 level, which would normally have an audience of people majoring or minoring in German. What I found in my searches, however, is that on the native speaker side of the equation, the audience may be considerably younger, as in equivalent of our middle or lower high school ages.
The upshot of this is that there are websites with wonderful activities for many of the texts that I am using, including games (see my forum post for the week), webquests and instructions for interactive group work. Below is a link to the site for the book I am using for the workshop. It is in German, but the layout is still clear, I believe:
http://lehrerfortbildung-bw.de/faecher/deutsch/projekte/dramatik/alte_dame/01_einstiege/
The section shown here is the introduction to the text and has students focusing on activities relevant to key features of the text: Poverty, the 1950s in Germany, Revenge, Self-Justice and Lynch Mob Justice. While most of these activities were designed for use with a teacher present to guide young students through their first uses of the internet, our experienced students can navigate the activities on their own or in groups, synchronously or asynchronously. Further sections cover aspects ranging from retention of knowledge from the text to issues of ethics and morality, as well as theater concepts. For a two-week unit, there is a great deal of excellent material here.
While this is not the case for all of my texts, many of the structures and ideas found here can easily be adapted to different works, and so I am quite excited going forward!
Well, this was my first time trying the Google translator. The title in English seems to be “Visit the Old Lady.” I wonder how accurate the translation is, and I wonder if examining the translation might be a good activity for those learning to read in German?
Interesting! And, I’m glad to see that you are avidly not reinventing the wheel.