District/School Administration PK-16 Program Support Educational Technology
Technology Toolkit

Café Parisien
Arlington Public Schools

Evidence of Effectiveness

Instructional objective: Students will use the Internet to access information on France and in French and then gather, analyze, synthesize, and present this information efficiently.

Evaluation: The teacher evaluated both students' research and documentation (created in Microsoft Word) and their oral presentations (created in PowerPoint). The quality of students' French, the structure of their work, the depth of their research, and their use of visual support and electronic tools were taken into account. Also their creativity and the originality and thoroughness of their presentations were of major importance in the teacher's evaluation. The teacher provided students with a rubric [PDF] to help them understand how they would be evaluated.

Student improvement: Students devoted their time and energy very enthusiastically to the project. Class time allocated to the program was one hour every seven days, but most students spent additional time on it either at home or in the computer lab at school. Students showed enormous amounts of creativity and were really invested in "their" restaurants. One of the students made the following comment: "This project is different; you actually learn without knowing it."

Because the project was multi-faceted and allowed each student to tap into his/her strength, specific interest, and sometimes passion, it motivated students to do their very best in an effort to perform well in the final competition. As a means to an end, and because they truly enjoy the medium (technology), students paid more attention to aspects of the French curriculum (grammar, reading, writing and speaking) than they otherwise would have, and their performance benefited from this interest.

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