Back in 2016 I blogged about a speaking activity where students made a short video in groups using Adobe Spark to give a weather forecast. Well, I do a similar version of that activity today, but now I use Flipgrid and it is an individual activity. In this post, I will walk you through the updated version of the activity.
Students can do a forecast on any one of of seven francophone cities I have preselected for them: Montreal, Canada; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Brussels, Belgium; Paris, France; Lausanne, Switzerland; Marrakech, Morocco; and Toliara, Madagascar. To start, I made a map showing where the cities were located in the world and shared this on the Canvas page where I posted the assignment. Next, I went to La Chaîne Météo and took screenshots of the weather forecasts for each of those cities for five days. I then posted those screenshots on Canvas for students to download and then upload to their Flipgrid. One example is below.
I provided class time for students to pick a city, download an image, and prepare a script. Then at home, students uploaded the image as a “sticker” on Flipgrid, and recorded their forecast. As they recorded, they used the pen tool to circle each day and an indicator of the weather fact they were sharing (they only had to say one thing about each day). You can see my example video below.
At the end of my example video (in which I chose a city not offered to the students), I pronounced all the vocabulary words so students could listen before recording their response. Below are two samplings (last year and this year) of student responses.
I do love this activity and I think it’s a great low-risk way for students to practice speaking, but one hurdle I have is getting all the students to complete it. Because it is a little more involved and requires speaking, which causes anxiety for many students, a number of students are reluctant to complete it and require reminders. I do offer students the option to do it with me in person, because as long as they are practicing the speaking, the medium doesn’t really matter.
Note: The use of screenshots from La Chaîne Météo are believed in good faith to be an acceptable use under the exception to France’s copyright law as non-commercial, educational use.
Enjoyed this post? Sign up below to receive future posts by email!
