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

Me
Springfield Public Schools

Description of Activities

First, the students created stories in English about themselves. Students used graphic organizers or Inspiration software to brainstorm the topics and ideas needed for their stories. Then they used those ideas to develop a draft of their story in English.

Second, the students used the computers in the classroom and the technology resource room to type their stories in Chinese. The classroom and technology resource room computers are equipped with the Chinese Language Kit (a software program that allows users to key in English letters and output Chinese characters.) The students typed in pinyin (a Chinese pronunciation system using English letters), and the computer generated possible Chinese character matches for each pinyin. The students then selected the correct characters they needed. This is the best method to input Chinese characters into the computer.

After students typed their drafts in Chinese, they imported pictures to illustrate their stories, and used the computers to make multimedia projects from what they wrote. The multimedia projects were created using Microsoft PowerPoint.

After the students completed their projects, they made oral presentations to the class. Their projects were projected onto a big screen with a computer and a data projector. At the end, the teacher collected the projects from everyone and made a book for the whole class. She also connected all the projects together and made a class slide show [PPS] for the parents at the school's open house. A sample of the student's work is published in the Chinese class web page. The sample PowerPoint project can be found online:
http://www.geocities.com/chinese_class/projects/aliciachau/sld001.htm

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