 and welcome to Coral's OER Hangout. My name is Carl Blythe and I'm the director of Coral and I'm really excited to have three teachers today, three French teachers who will be talking about how they have adapted an OER. That's the focus of our talk tonight. Our hangout title is Talk to Teachers Who Have Adopted and Adapted OER. And as I said they all three have adopted and adapted the same OER. So that will give us a kind of a thread, kind of a field conductor that makes all of this more coherent. Even though there'll be speaking about a French OER, if you don't, if your foreign language that you teach is another language don't worry because it should be applicable to people who teach different foreign languages and use different OERs. So I want to mention also at the beginning that Coral we have developed an OER course that really explains the ins and outs and the details of OER, from how to find OER, to how to implement OER, how to remix or adapt OER. The basics about creative commons licenses because licenses are so important to understanding the wonderful world of OER. So you'll find that under if you go to the Coral homepage there's a tab that says about and that's general information about Coral and just from that drop down menu select open education and we'll give you lots of background information including that course on open education and OER. So let me introduce our speakers tonight. Okay it looks like we lost Carl. This is Sarah from Coral so I'll just introduce the presenters while we wait for Carl to come back. So we have Alexandra Guiron from a French professor from South Puget Sound Community College and that's in Washington right? Yeah okay and then we have Don Michael, a French teacher from Reynoldsburg City Schools in Ohio and Valérie Morgant, a French lecturer from California State University St. Bernardino so he'll be talking to us very briefly about their experiences and then we'll do Q&A after that. So Alex would you like to go first? Sure yeah thank you. Hi my name is Alex Guiron and I am associate professor of French at South Puget Sound Community College. I first discovered Français Interactif way back when I was teaching at the Alliance Francaise a Pensiero. I originally discovered it through a graphic called La La Modette which is in Texas French grammar and I found it to be a playful and accessible and engaging and well presented way of introducing what's a rather difficult concept in French which is a type of passé composé, a type of past. It led me to use Texas French grammar more and more and from there I discovered Français Interactif. Back then I was still teaching at the Alliance Francaise so I didn't have a choice of textbook but I eventually moved to Olympia where I am in a very small French department in fact right now the French department is me so I get to pick my book and it was very very quickly I decided to adopt FI and move away from Valette and Valette type books which I found lack authenticity, lack idiomatic language not very vernacular, they always feel a little dated even when they're new and they're super expensive. Back then it was about 2007 my students were paying about 200 bucks for that book which I found to be hair-raising and I decided to choose Français Interactif because I really liked that the material is authentic that it's presented playfully. I love the ancillary materials like the companion page that each chapter has and Texas French grammar which I really mentioned before and really really like. I like that there's an emphasis on phonetics which is lacking in other textbooks and that there's a novel and brain-based way of acquiring vocabulary through the préparation du vocabulaire activities. I really like the fact that grammar is approached via inference and not lecture so that's novel and also very effective and also and most importantly price it's a really really accessible book especially considering that it's a high quality product so those were all the decisions and I've been using the book for a couple years when I want to grant from the state of Washington to develop OER material for the state of Washington and I'm going to share my screen here so this is the open course library and it's the state of Washington runs it and it's an initiative to develop high quality courses and course materials and everything has a cc by license all the course materials. The a major requirement for the program was that the textbook had to cost $30 or less so for me français interactif was an obvious choice a natural choice and obviously I went with it. It was a pretty rigorous process there was a heavy emphasis on alignment between outcomes objectives and assessments and a focus on universal design back when universal design wasn't quite such the buzzword that it is today so I did overcome some challenges adapting français interactif to to my classes and for the open course library and one of the big ones is that spscc runs on a quarterly system meaning that the book had to get split into three parts instead of two which seems like a simple process except that some concepts as a result get introduced in the second quarter instead of the first quarter and I'm thinking here specifically of the passé composé which I feel needs to be introduced as early as possible so there are some there was a little bit of shifting of material that I had to do for that to to happen. Another factor that I had to contend with is that the content load is not always very even from one chapter to the next. One example that jumps to mind is that chapter seven of the book is very content heavy and I'm talking here specifically about syntactically new concepts so concepts that don't occur in my students native languages English so and that they have to really work on very hard and so there's three big concepts that are introduced in one chapter and so that makes for a very very a lot of thinking on the part of my students I guess and another challenge which is really unique to Washington State is that we have a program called Running Start. High school students can attend college classes and graduate from high school with an AA if they have a GPA that meets basic requirements and that really does change the dynamic of the classroom at the community college. We have students who are between the ages of 16 and 19 and most of them live at home with their parents their commuters so they're not really experiencing the you know away from home for the first time and hanging out with friends and so I had to adapt some of the material to make it more relevant to them in terms of content. So yeah that's those are the big big changes I had to make I'm still happy that I made the switch to this book I'm going to continue to use it as long as I teach French and as long as as it's available to me. I also do want to note that I'm very grateful for the new edition the the changes that you made to the book I think really improve it for the better. So that's all I've got thank you so much for developing this amazing material and I'm very grateful that it's available to me. Thanks. So thanks Alex and we'll come back to you with some questions about how you've perhaps adapted it to your particular context in Washington. So let's pass it over to Dawn. Okay, bonsoir. So I am currently a high school French teacher but I started my career teaching university level for let's call it 10 years so I don't have to count right now. So my training was set as a university teacher so I'm definitely more comfortable with college level materials and then I started teaching high school as well as some adjunct work in 2002 and I used a variety of high school level textbooks none of which made me very happy for a variety of reasons mostly because starting out as a university level teacher university materials don't spend a lot of the time in the imagine your name is Juan and you and your friend Julio are on the subway in Madrid and all these kind of imaginary scenarios that a lot of high school and junior high materials go so I'm more comfortable with university level materials and I found myself in a situation where the textbooks that I had were outdated they did not align to the new act full proficiency based standards and the state of Ohio standards which switched to proficiency based and I wasn't satisfied I also didn't have a textbook budget and I was familiar with Texas French grammar already I'd use that as a supplement so when I really started diving into Française Interactive I was very very pleased with what I found there so I would say in 2012 I started using Française Interactive as the basis for my level one and level two courses so I kind of divvied it up into what you would do is first semester I did this french one and then what you would do is second semester I did is french two leaving out a few things because there are some things that aren't necessary in level two our target level is novice high so students don't need to be able to use the subjunctive and you know the what Spanish speakers know as the preterite the perfect and the imperfect they don't have to use those handily to hit novice high in high school but when I rolled it out I did pretty much use I did pretty much use the the materials exactly as they were but over time I'm going to share my screen here over time I started adapting to more closely align with the state of Ohio and national actful standards because I was teaching for proficiency and not for the discrete grammar mastery that you know was being focused on so I wrote my curricula for levels one and levels two based generally on the the Française Interactive progression and I use many of the activities especially the learning the grammar through inference I use the cultural readings it's like this is my curriculum guide and it's based on having trouble scrolling here with all these things going on my screen and it's based on the contents of Française Interactive I use the video resources quite a bit the nice thing about them is that they're native speakers but they are using vocabulary that is included in the chapter and so that makes that makes the videos more comprehensible for my students so they get the advantage of native speakers without many authentic video resources are not comprehensible for novices and again I'm hanging up a bit so what I've done over the years I used to just use the the textbook materials straight up but what I've done over the years is started adapting it more so I'm just going to show a couple tools for anyone else this is a tool called insert learning it you can use it for several you can use several uses for free and then it is a subscription but it allows you to take a web page and so you can make a google doc or I'm not sure what the microsoft version would be of that and you can insert questions into the document itself you can also put video and other interactive activities in there so I sorry I was trying to show here I have done that you can kind of see in the background here this is from chapter one and I took some of the activities out of the PDF of the chapter and put them in and then I turn it into an interactive activity where there are some questions that are free response I want to try to show this and some questions are multiple choice so I've taken those paper activities and put them online and my students who use Chromebooks we do blended learning my students can do these same activities that would have been in the book but it's easier for me to grade and they can do them online so this is at the beginning of chapter one you can see I've taken the activities I've embedded the introductory video from the chapter and the students have to reflect on things that they'll learn I've taken some of the activities and posed other questions or included things there here's one of the fantastic inferential ways that grammar is presented so this is you know introducing definite articles and since I'm proficiency based we don't test grammar discreetly but obviously won't let the students to be familiar with what's going on so I've just taken the paper activity I've adapted it I've created some multiple choice and this way we can do this and this saves a lot here I've put in the note couture so I've got my cultural note and questions there and this just transformed brilliantly for me my students can access this from anything okay online it's easy to grade they can do it at home another tool that I use with the Francais interactive tools is because Francais active has all these videos that are wonderful and free that go with each chapter and if you're using the Spanish materials they have Spanish videos etc as well so I have taken these videos which are up on the right of my screen here I've taken those and I have added them to my YouTube channel and to make sure that I get subtitles for them and then I put them into ed puzzle and if you're not familiar with ed puzzle it's a great tool where you can insert questions directly into a video at the spot where you're looking for comprehension so I use ed puzzle for listening comprehension I found that it greatly increases listening comprehension success and so I'm trying to open folder here and show how many of the videos that I've used so I use them for practice purposes I use them for testing I use the Francais interactive testing videos that are available and I use those for my students and the students if respond very well to them they recognize the they're the same speakers over and over again they start to have opinions about the people they have fairly strong feelings about which people they like and which people they don't like they find some people harder to understand than others and they appreciate the the fact that their the video materials are designed to go with the curriculum and so they're comprehensible and they that's very helpful with high school students who frequently there's a high level of anxiety about language learning some of them have had negative experiences in the past so you can see if you go across these these several videos are from the Francais interactive they'll show you have a number of questions that are in there and so I again take advantage of all these resources which are fabulous because I know they go with my curriculum if I were just going to search out on youtube or generally on the internet to try to find level appropriate video resources audio video resources that go with my curriculum that's a challenge as far as the other resources that come with Francais interactive they're fabulous in particular the vocabulary prep that Alex mentioned my high school students need more scaffolding so the vocabulary prep template which is down on every chapter okay where is it okay the preparation to vocabulary there's a generic template that Francais interactive provides my high schoolers need more scaffolding than that so for each chapter I have a vocab prep that I have tailored I've taken that template and tailored it specifically for my high school students so I've given them the themes I've given them very specific instructions so rather than setting them loose and saying make 10 sets of words that are associated together I've given them specifically find these words that are associated for example in this is chapter three that I have up so I'd have find three weather phenomenon that happened in the spring in Ohio find three body words for bodies of water find three activities that you do outside so I've taken the template from Francais interactive because it's OER and I could do with it what I need I've adapted those things there are testing materials available initially I did use some of those but they just weren't appropriate for proficiency based and for the level of my students really as I discovered the hard way but I do use the testing videos quite a bit they're very helpful again the video resources for this are just gold also the cultural quests that come on the activity internet I enjoy using those with my students as well I do have to caution if someone is adapting any of these materials for k-12 use to make sure that you screen everything ahead of time including Texas French Grammar because they're definitely designed for university students so there are drug and alcohol use references and there's the complex relationship of Tex and Tammy Yarmadillo's and Betty the home wrecker so my kids kind of get a kick out of that but I always have to kind of feel out with the students how comfortable they're going to be and then I have to make judgments as I go through the activities and change some of the things up so that is something I would caution someone k-12 make sure you're previewing everything and you're probably going to need to adapt I did also want to point out I can't know that the the center also has other French resources and for many other languages so if you go to their home site they have lots and lots of resources I pointed my Spanish colleagues there for French I've used the intermediate and advanced level resources as well for my level three class which is intermediate and so they're doing more advanced things so I use some of the more advanced resources for my level three class the video resources in particular are fabulous I really appreciate the speaking with the native speakers I'm doing those interviews have been fabulous for me so that all in all this is transform my program I have no budget and I've been able to build so much just from this so high school teachers are always you know that I'm talking to on Twitter always talking about what can I do you know I don't have a budget or I have a very little budget these are fabulous tools and then you can adapt them and tweak them as you need and I'm happy to share you know whatever I have with people so that they can see what I've done I'm happy to share I've got Google Forms all kinds of embedded videos in Google Forms note Kutral embedded into Google Forms for reading comprehension all kinds of things that I've been able to do because this is an OER it's been fabulous all right thank you so much Dawn that's great I'm sure there are going to be other questions about specifics of adapting you mentioned a couple of really good tools insert learning in ed puzzle we're going to have to check those out afterwards okay so on to Valerie Valerie are you still there please I'm here can you see oh yes thank you and how do I unshare uh for me no stop sharing got it got it got it got it got it got it sharing there you go all right okay so my turn well uh so I'm last so um you've uh you impressed me and I was very impressed by what Alex said you know regarding the phonetics and and and so on and uh so I'm going to start with um how it all started with us so uh the problem with our the students in our community um have very few resources and we used to use a book and I think Alex mentioned that problem as well the book was our treacherously expensive and so I think the book that had to go with the online platform for all the homework and so on was over three hundred or three hundred and fifty dollars um and the kids could not sell that back I mean they could sell the book back but the online platform they were stuck with they could they were absolutely forbidden to exchange it or to share it so um and we try to negotiate directly with the publishers and they they offered maybe uh you know for the students to rent rather than to buy but nothing was really acceptable um so our program decided to to to to check out français interactif we just like uh Dawn and Alex have mentioned already we were familiar with the text french grammar and we use that as additional resources so it made sense to us to to look into that so we all created accounts and we were really interested in in the amount of material that was available for us because it wasn't like a starter pack we could start with it and then just go from there um so that's what we did uh we started with it and then little little we adapted it uh to be honest with you the first time I started it it just didn't exactly go very well with our student population in the sense that um there were things I'm not I was not too too impressed by for example the numbers that you start with just a few numbers up to 60 and then you're left uh until chapter three when you just learn 70 and uh and all that um I think Alex mentioned the passive composite until uh chapter six actually for me it's a different thing uh we actually are don't do not dwell on grammar quite so heavily uh so of course passive composite is important when it comes to conversations about the past um but we do not uh emphasizes or stress it until the second quarter um I think it's a little bit like second year at high school uh you go you you uh you dig deep into the present tense and the near future and then you go to the past during the second year anyway that's what I remembered because I used to teach at high school it seemed to me that it was like that and we've adapted that to a quarter system at at at university um so there are things that that I wasn't too impressed by but then but I think it's because I relied or we relied too heavily on the material trying to just use it use it as it was for example using the france interactive exams without necessarily thinking of our own student population um using the vocabulary um worksheets uh again that's something that I adapted because that didn't quite work for me it felt too dry and um not scaffolding enough I think uh don't you've mentioned it yourself so uh but my the biggest thing for me was not to have the comfort of a platform uh in which to um to use france interactive and to have maybe google forms and so on so similarly to alex we have a program called the affordable affordable learning solution and it's also for textbooks that are less than um I think the it's 50 or 40 or 50 dollars uh a week uh so I applied um I presented the project to use google tools associated with france interactive in order to form some kind of platform of course it's not going to be the kia or the henley platform but it's it's uh it's the best we could we could do um so I've uh I'm using the google classroom and in which the in which I offer every week um a homework menu uh that lots and lots of google forms that students can fill in if they're interested so the students are given a reflection part of a reflective part in their in their homework they have to reflect on their homework and decide on what they think is a priority as far as their concern whether it's grammar or vocabulary or all this combined or culture and so on I give them a menu to choose from and and lots and lots of google forms that I've uh that I've inserted in the google classroom some on the videos uh some on the vocabulary on the grammar and I think I probably have between 10 and 12 different google forms for each chapter but also they are a lot I use quizlets as well as as an option for homework there are a lot of really good quizlet um um uh how do you say games and so on out there I also use um I use duolingo quite a bit uh along with with France Interactive to reinforce certain concepts and especially the duolingo stories are great and students are always eager to uh to learn more if they have uh if they are I don't know if they have to wait for 10 minutes they're always with their phone uh around right so using using duolingo on their phone is is perfect um what else I lose a lot so lots of games and this is how I insert culture because as far as I'm concerned I don't know the culture okay I think um Don you mentioned the the culture in each chapter and I agree that's that's really good um but what I'm not too impressed about are the little notes on the side in the margins for culture they're fine a little bit dry so I like to uh have some cultural uh experiences such as uh going into google google maps and uh going to street level and walking along a street like rue de l'arrêt rue de la République in nion and and looking left and right and see um what kind of shops there are they are there and uh where would they like to stop and uh you know things like that um so basically I'm using français interactive as my main results but I'm also adding a lot of extra material and that works better for me um I also use video tutorials because some students are not very good at understanding the text grammar when they read it so I also have google forms to help them uh digest the material a little bit and maybe rephrase it but if it's a little bit difficult then I'm going to prepare a video using a Camtasia you know a video tutorial which I post in my in my class on blackboard and but yes I am thankful for français interactive I think it's an amazing resource and I'm a bit sad not to see more videos being constantly uh brought up because as you said we know these people um I'm my students are very fond of yas we like charles as well and now these people are much older than they were 10 years ago I'm sure what's happened to them I'd like to know uh we know everything about frank and Nancy and their two daughters so I just would I don't know I'd like to would like to see a bigger bigger library but it's already big enough I'm sure and they've put so much work into it and thankful I'm going to be eternally grateful and that's it I could have shared some but I forgot to share my my screens hang on I'm going to share my screen just just to share to show you um a couple of things for example this is a padlet that I use uh in my class I I like padlets and this is for their presentional written presentation or presentation of activities padlets are quite fun uh this is uh what I uh what I submitted for my proposal for affordable learning solution um and you have some comments from students here what they choose to do a lot of them just want to use their iPhones they they haven't bought them the the book but some of them choose to print out the book or they choose to buy uh the book another thing that I forgot to mention is that I also use um flip grid okay I don't know that's that's the problem when you're sharing is that I don't remember where they are okay flip grid oh there he is okay I also use flip grid for the uh oral presentations my students have to talk about for example here they talked about what they ate and they can ask each other questions I like I like flip grid a lot yes I think you need to to switch the screen we're still looking at the padlet oh you're still looking at the padlet yes okay all right uh meeting control I'm going to stop sharing for a while okay uh so then I'm okay so share again I suppose can so I think now you can see uh the affordable learning solution uh project that I posted that is posted on Merlot um which is for online resources okay and then I'm going to stop sharing this I don't know if I can okay stop sharing sharing and can you can you see the flip grid I'm sorry can you see my not yet no no okay now we can see it oh you could okay that's good so the flip grid is really useful and I think I'm gonna stop right now because I'm getting confused with how to share and stop sharing so there we go thank you thank you that's the excellent so that gives us still let's see we have plenty of time for a Q&A and I want to encourage you all the participants um remember to use your chat function at the bottom there's a little uh menu that says uh a little tab that says chat you can type your questions directly into the chat box and we will read them and make sure that our speakers address those issues so let me go ahead and start start things off I um wanted to I have a question that goes to Dawn you mentioned then the tools insert learning and ed puzzle I believe you said that insert learning was um an open resource but you did have to pay for it after it reached a certain level is that correct yes um it's it is it's a um extension that goes onto chrome or firefox or I believe internet um explore and I I'm a paid user but I believe you get three to five um that you can use free um and then you there's also a library so you can go on and see what other people have created and then after that um then there's a charge um it is fabulous if you are doing any kind of blended learning or you want to assign homework and um it's quite easy to take the pdf material from France Interactive or any of the other OERs and to put them into something and make it uh interactive and again you can embed the videos um in there as well you can embed um links to Flipgrid um as well which is another tool that I use so you could really turn um you know one one page into an activity where you were covering multiple skills um and multiple modes of communication um so it's it's um it's really been helpful for me um ed puzzle is another one where you get a certain amount for free and then you can pay there are institutional subscriptions so if there's you know multiple teachers in a department or a school um they do have a rate again I'm a super user so I'm I'm not paying right now but um and it it has improved listening comprehension results with my students I don't have a statistic to give you I can just say I can take the same listening comprehension video that I gave before using it and what I use with it use it now and the results are so much greater because you can place the question directly in the listening passage where they need to find they need to find the information um and it will pull in videos from YouTube and um all kinds of other places and you can upload your videos as well so and that's the the videos for Frantzana Artiva have been such a fantastic resource overall yeah so I want to make a point um just to follow up about all three of you mentioned that you like the videos that you use the videos in different ways and of course as a developer I like to hear that but um I wanted to stress the fact that what you've done with Ed Puzzle you take the videos because you can download all of this right we give you the rights to download it all and then you've actually edited the videos you've added a layer of information on top of the videos so that makes it I mean it basically you're seeing the same thing all of you is that you our materials were a good template a good starting point and then you took it one step further you added scaffolding that your students needed or you tweaked it in some way that made it you know work work with your student population and and what I wanted to say to all of you is that you mentioned also the piperation vocabulaire uh that's a template in itself and we meant it as a template we meant it as a starting point not as the end point and I think too many teachers look at textbooks and they think that that's it it doesn't give them any wiggle room to play with the materials but we wanted to kind of suggest to you well here's one way of doing it but you know go ahead and have fun and there is kind of this ludic or playful quality to our materials and that's we were trying to really invite people like yourselves to to play along with us so I'm it's really I must admit it's really great to hear all three of you talk about how you're playing with these materials because I look at textbooks as just templates anyhow and since they are made for a generic audience or in our case we made it for the University of Texas students and we figure it's it's up to everybody else in the world to adapt it to their students so it's really tremendous it's very it's pleasing for me to listen to you guys talk about your materials just to add on to that real quick we have that question from the audience from Elsie who was who was basically trying to define it and said you have adapted parts of France interactive but she was wondering if you have not created your own textbook also with with parts of I don't know but it didn't seem like you have just wanted to throw this in here who was wondering she was wondering if you had created your own textbook was that question for me or who is that question for everybody um I I wouldn't say I've created my own textbook but I've created my own curriculum that topically aligns with France interactive and then I have written a lot of materials some inspired from France interactive some simply based on the theme but I wouldn't call it a textbook I don't know about Valerie and Alex I also have not created a textbook I think the longer you teach the more material you generate and you sort of build this body of stuff that you can use but it's never been put together in one cohesive place other than my own head yes yes I would say it's the same I it's it's I think it's it's easy to have France interactive as a basis for what I'm going to do and then I add a lot of additional material um because um because yes as I think Alex was saying right we we've got tons of things that we've been using and it was the same with the other books as well so we don't have we don't create our own but we we adapt continuously great there is also um an earlier question from Julie um and she was interested the two this is for Alexandra she was interested to know what your favorite changes in the new edition were um I was thinking specifically about chapter four um I it's a chapter where there's a lot of physical descriptions and um since the book was first created I think that um more arrays have changed and times have changed and people have become much more sensitive to certain images and and the changes reflected students new values and so those that would be the the main the main things I think it was really an adaptation to changing times yeah can I just make a comment about that we were getting feedback from the University of Texas students that they were uncomfortable with some of the activities so what worked 10 years ago doesn't work anymore and they didn't want to describe people um even though these were caricatures caricatures are often playing awful sometimes sometimes ethnic stereotypes and it made them very uncomfortable so this is just an example of shifting of changing sensibilities what was okay 10 15 years ago is no longer okay and um you can see it all in in the ways society is changing dealing with the me too movement or whatever whatever the topic is what you used to be able to do is suddenly no longer appropriate and so we went through we got feedback from a number of of institutions and a number of students and we went through and made changes not just in chapter four it's pretty obvious but throughout the textbook so and that's just something that's kind of ongoing we often think of of adapting textbooks of to reflect who is now the president and what are the television programs but there's even something deeper and that is just the public's changing sensibilities of what you can do and what you can talk about and how you can talk about it which is just kind of interesting i want to ask a question a general question to all three of you and it sounds like there was a learning curve that you spent the first year so just learning the materials how long did it take you to feel that you had permission to actually adapt how long did it take you to feel like okay because sometimes people don't understand that open education that oer the whole point is adaptation that they um they they still use it like it's out of the box okay uh well didn't take me long at all it was more uh first uh the delay in uh in adding supplementary material was simply because i first wanted to really use what was there and uh and see how it worked so that that just had to do with checking it out with my students seeing how it works and then going from there so of course it took uh probably about a year at least for each level for each level to be completely uh consistent to know what needed to be done but for you um there was no no sense of you you knew that you had permission right from from the beginning yes because uh my uh my boss is really into oer so uh we we had talked about it a lot and and we knew it was it was fine and i think it's pretty clear on on your on your website too yeah we try to make it clear but you'd be surprised because people um since we're we're trying to retrain the public to understand that they can play along with us oh yes um have you have any of the three of you been inspired to create your own material really from the trash in other words not simply just adapt a lesson from posse anti-teeth but create your own content like be inspired by a lesson on i don't know like the you talked about the activity and and then do your own activity right yes can i please give me an example yes um so um definitely um often i've taken um for example uh chapter three which is um les vacances in france which is vacation in france so we cover geography and leisure activities and um i have scaffold that all into at the end of the chapter um the students doing research and planning vacations in france and then writing about it um writing about in um in french um how they're going to get to france where they're going to stay what season it will be in and what will the weather be like in that area when they're there and what are the local activities so um really embedding culture um as well as the language and then um speaking in terms of proficiency level um offering the opportunity for students to level up and write um in the present or teaching them the future push so that they can write in the near future um and expanding their their level um you know moving up their level so that would be something that i've done um also uh like taking um i've done for an exam for the chapter six which is about places in the city um i've done for an exam where i've given them um a map of a city and they have and said okay you're going to be a student studying abroad i usually pick two thoughts because that's where i studied um and you're going to need to find this list of places but then they would have to describe where places were located and you know relevant to each other but it was a very real life so really getting into the actual context of authenticity um so i've definitely taken i've definitely been inspired from what i found in france interactif and then to put those into as authentic of an learning experience and creating a product as possible and as tools especially all the google tools have evolved you know being able to use those incorporate so yes i would say i i'm constantly doing that and my class is never the same even though france interactif is my launching point um and then if i could quickly your question about knowing i could change things i always knew i could but it took me a year or two to figure out what exactly i was doing to figure out how to change things in the way that was best suited for my students also because the new actual standards came out and state of ohio and trying to be a standards aligned teacher and align that with france interactif it just took me a while to learn i think we have to remember that for a lot of teachers this is very difficult because especially k-12 teachers are not taught how to write materials and are not taught how to write you they don't necessarily know how to do this so um i think like like resources like this like your center and doing things like this are really important to help us teach our colleagues in the field you know everything whether it's a university level what ballerina alex have done or you know what i'm doing at k-12 to share all of these things that are possible that you can do it because i think a lot of people come out and are used to it being handed to them prescriptively and that's all they can do that's a very good point because i i remember hearing all the time when i was coming along in graduate school you know a textbook is not the curriculum but it it actually becomes the curriculum it becomes everything for certain or certainly for a beginning teacher because they feel like they either don't have permission to go beyond the textbook or they're not adept at it they hadn't been trained to do that but i'm i'm glad you made that point because um i think when you become a really good teacher is when you become creative and you start creating your own materials because number one you you know your students and everybody agrees that um the materials must be adapted to reflect the students interest and and only you know that so that's the point of getting around generic materials they're going to be generic by nature and i personally think that we should do more in teacher training with materials having them produce materials having them learn about these cool things like insert learning and edu puzzle and so that people aren't you know they're not starting from scratch there's a ton of open content out there that's really high quality that's the other point to make and that's being produced by all kinds of organizations professional uh educational organizations and so it's really becoming more and more a matter of learning how to adapt somebody else's material so um let's see do we have any other questions so Elsie was asking if she could remix parts that are on the website or in in the fi program and i answered her saying absolutely because it has the most open license if i has the most open license that means that you can take any videos audios any texts that is in the program and you can put it in your own google docs word docs and you can republish it and use it for your classroom that's right so if you wanted to produce your own textbook make a mashup of france anti-actif and other things that you find out there in the world on the internet you can create your own textbook and even try to make money off of it because it um it has a completely open license so i see that we're coming up on the hour and um i want to thank our three participants our three teachers who are doing who are our three adapters of france anti-actif it's really been a pleasure to listen to you talk about your own experiences and i wanted to mention in closing a couple of things we have something at coral called the learn community and of course that spell l oer in learn play on oer and and the community are people who have created oer who are implementing oer who are reviewing oer's for others so but all three of you are should be a member of the learn community and you can get badges for promoting creating and using oer so please go and visit that that tab on our website i mentioned at the beginning we have a new oer course there's always more information to learn because there are new developments with the licensing new things to learn in the wonderful world of open education so thank you all um i think alex and don and valérie merci bien and for all of you who are interested in france anti-actif just go visit the website and if you have questions you can give us a call or send us an email and we'll answer you thank you thank you so bye everybody bye