Premiers Pas Sur l'Internet
Premiers Pas Sur l'Internet
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Click here to look at the Premier Pas Sur l'Internet site.
Click here to look at the Activity on the Premier Pas Sur l'Internet site.
Click here to see the answers to the Premier Pas Sur l'Internet Activity.
Premiers Pas Sur l'Internet is a marvellous webzine that stands apart from some of its competitors in one chief respect - it's almost entirely written by its teenage readers. The site divides up into about 18 different sections covering a variety of interests for children, as well as penpal, story-writing, journalism pages and much more. The main part of the site that the fusée activity aims for is that dedicated to penpals - headed "Correspondants" here. This very simply contains a list of up to a hundred different teenagers looking for e-mail correspondence, each one describing themselves and their interests in a short paragraph. This obviously provides both a good way to find a penpal, and through it a great opportunity to practise vocabulary to talk about yourself, family and friends. There are also class groups looking for penpals listed in this section under the "Correspondance Scolaire" heading. Each paragraph in the list of penpals contains a link which, when clicked, should open a new e-mail to the right address in the mail program on your computer, such as Microsoft Outlook. To be sure that clicking on this link will work, look in your Internet Options or Preferences window (under the Tools drop-down menu in Internet Explorer or the Edit menu in Netscape Navigator), and check the settings for mail.
The fusée activity also practises describing friends and their likes and dislikes. You could extend this exercise to giving an opinion about one of the people they read about in the list of penpals (e.g. "Je m'entends bien avec Gaëlle. Comme moi, elle aime bien surfer sur internet). The "Correspondants" section also contains a simple and comparatively very user-friendly discussion forum ("Forum - échanges et débats d'idées") with short opinions posted up on a wide range of subjects, a club page for readers ("Annonces de Clubs") who want to form or join others with similar interests, and a problem page ("Mekefer?") with personal problems posted up by readers along with answers to their problems from others.
Finally, another part of Premiers Pas Sur l'Internet which could be useful and which certainly makes interesting and relatively simple reading is the "Dictionnaire". This is a French-to-French dictionary with the definitions written by readers, sometimes in a straightforward and sometimes in a quasi-poetic style, and it covers a large amount of vocabulary that pupils will have met in the first two stages of fusée.
Sssplash
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Click here to look at the Sssplash site.
Click here to look at the Activity on the Sssplash site.
Click here to see the answers to the Sssplash Activity.
The Sssplash site acts as a large contrast to the preceding Premiers Pas Sur l'Internet - it's loud, flashy, and full of moving pictures, while actually containing only a fraction of the material to be found in Premiers Pas. The most important thing to say initially is that to use this site you must have Quicktime installed on your computer. To download this for free from the Apple website, click here . Once this is installed, the garish animated cartoons on the Sssplash site will start to function properly. From the homepage you have to choose either which category and age you fall into, which then takes you to the appropriate section (although these all seem to be pretty similar in what they offer). The homepage itself and the list of options on it is the basis of the first part of the fusée activity.
The second part of the activity guides pupils towards the "Sssplashblablabla" section. This is a large discussion forum with many different topics and sorts of forums, from live chat to posting opinions and questions to an agony aunt. To use any of these, however, you need to have a nickname ("pseudo") and password. Pupils can register their own details, or alternatively use the special fusée pseudo which is "fusee" with its password "FF15514".
Besides the forum, Sssplash is also a useful search engine aimed squarely at teenagers and the sites they like. As well as searching for specific words or phrases entered into the "Tape ton mot" box in the middle of the menu bar at the bottom of the screen, if you click on "Tes meilleurs sites" there is a list of different topics in a similar vein to a search engine like Yahoo! A possible extension activity would be to find a site on a certain topic and then write a mini-report about it.