Using Hot Potatoes and Google Docs to create quizzes about the French movie “Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain”

Class or Subject Area: French

Specific Learning Objectives:

Writing (intermediate / advanced):

Students summarize and synthesize information and arguments from a number of sources.

Students understand and summarize the plot and sequence of events in a film and answer further questions of detail.

Grade Level(s): 10-12

Activity Summary:

After watching in class the movie “Amelie” , students complete a series of 6 online quizzes. The completion of quiz 1 gives access to quiz 2 etc.

What you need:

Access to Internet

Access to Google Docs

Hot Potatoes, a quiz maker available for free on the Internet

How it works:

The teacher previews the movie and writes a series of questions relevant to the objectives of the lesson.

If needed, the teacher downloads tutorials on how to use Hot Potatoes and how to make quizzes by using the “form” feature on Google Docs.

(S)he breaks down the series of questions in several quizzes. Students will need to reach a given score to be able to go from quiz to quiz.

Preparation:

Preview the movie.

Make a list of 50-60 questions about the movie.

Download Hot Potatoes and familiarize yourself with the application.

Visit Google Docs and familiarize yourself with the “form” feature; there are plenty of tutorials on the Internet on how to make quizzes with Google Docs.

Spread out your list of 50-60 questions in several quizzes (created with Hot Potatoes and/or Google Docs) and publish those quizzes on the web.

Explain the assignment to your students.

Directions for the students:

“ Let’s see what you remember from the movie “Amelie”. In order to do so, go to the following web page [url of quiz 1]. If you reach the following score (it is up to the teacher to decide if the students need or not a perfect score), you will get access to the next quiz.

Sample:

Here is the starting quiz of a series of six, made with Hot Potatoes. Here is the last quiz of that series, made with Google Docs. Another option is to ask students to use Google Maps to list all the places mentioned in the movie and to write comments about those places by using the information given by the quizzes, like in the following example.