Pariscope
Pariscope
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Click here to look at the Pariscope site.
Click here to look at the Activity on the Pariscope site.
Click here to see the answers to the Pariscope Activity.
Pariscope is a user-friendly site giving information on what's on in Paris - a bit like Time Out. As well as containing hundreds of different examples of activities with which you can practise the structures learnt in Unit 1, it also gives a good impression of the different arrondissements of the city. From the homepage, you can either search the different sections of the site, such as cinema or music, or look at the recommendations and new releases highlighted in the main part of the page. The fusée en ligne activity centres on finding things to do in different districts of Paris and entertaining a child in the "Enfants" section of the site.
Once you've chosen an area or a particular restaurant, cinema or other activity, a good alternative is to open the "Plan du quartier" mini-window. This gives an interactive map of the surrounding area, with which you can find nearby other places to go out - and hence providing source material for describing an imagined day's worth of activities. To do this you choose what kind of place you're looking for in the "Services à proximité" drop-down list and several will be suggested with further information about them.
MO5: the Computer History Museum
| Vocabulary level: | |
| Website size: | |
| Complexity: | |
| Interactive |
Click here to look at the MO5 site.
Click here to look at the Activity on the MO5 site.
Click here to see the answers to the MO5 Activity.
The Musée d'Histoire Informatique is a labour of love written by a French computer enthusiast and gives an amusing look back at the cumbersome machines that pre-date the PC of today. The site will obviously be of interest to pupils keen on computers and video games, although those turned off by the subject might find less to keep them entertained. An upcoming Musée des Jeux Vidéo is advertised on the homepage, but for now the computer museum is the only part that works. The main menu page of the museum has translations of the different section headings in English, and the detailed descriptions of machines offer English "translations" too. These are automatic ones done by a computer itself, however, and the results are pretty unintelligible half the time, so it's best to advise students to avoid being sidetracked by this option.
Our activity focuses on the "Collection personnelle", which is an exhaustive list of the hundreds of old models in the museum's collection. The technical details on each of these are often too difficult for pupils at this level to understand, but they'll probably find the accompanying photographs amusing. After looking at the different computers in the collection, another good angle is to use the "Visite guidée" which gives a more accessible history of the computer in French that could be used for a comprehension exercise. .