Images Postcards from the Bowman Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina You can browse by country, name, or subject (includes photos and many caricatures as well, like the one on the left). Photos from the French site 1914-1918.fr. Texts For both in-class discussion and as a written assignment, I had students read an...Read more »
Welcome to a new semester! I’m teaching a civilization class this spring and thought I’d share some of the ideas I’m using for course material. In this post I talked about using Gallica to find primary sources, and used the example of a geography text book to demonstrate the process. As an introduction to...Read more »
I was living in France in 1999-2000 when the millennium was all the rage. On the occasion of the turn of the new century (yes, a year early), I picked up a copy of a compilation CD called Les plus grandes chansons du siècle. I still have it and indeed, it has many classics, one...Read more »
Using crossword puzzles in the classroom can run the risk of seeming too juvenile. I picked up a couple of crossword vocabulary books in Paris and admittedly, their target audience is probably around the age of ten or twelve, with cartoon illustrations and very basic topics (safari animals, going to the movies, etc.) But as...Read more »
Have you noticed that something as quotidien as handwriting can vary dramatically between those schooled in France and in the U.S., even though we use the same characters? It seems so trivial, but a font can immediately remind you of a particular cultural milieu. If you want to nurture your inner graphic designer, lend...Read more »
Need a quick activity idea to get students speaking to each other? Bonus if the activity is a quick review of some grammatical terms? Enter Mad Libs, that fill-in-the-blanks game that most students will be familiar with from their childhood. Mad Libs has seen a recent comeback among adults and I’ve even spotted them...Read more »
In spite of the very public criticism of Google Books by the administrators of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the latter has engaged for years in a similar digitization project called Gallica. Ironically, you can often find texts on Gallica that are not available on Google Books because Google cannot publish full-text documents if there is...Read more »
You may want to file this one under “The Obvious,” but this was a revelation for me: After many years of piles collecting and covering every flat surface in my surroundings, I’ve finally settled on a way to keep my course materials, lesson plans, and grading all in one place. This is my table-top...Read more »
