Today continues my chronicling of links to online resources various teachers can use in the classroom. Naturally, a QuickTime version of the video is ready for you to download so you can get this content past the district firewalls. Here’s what I’ll call half a resource for foreign/world language teachers and a full ten-minute running, Cannes-film-festival entering short film for social science teachers.
Roll Your “R”s
On my way to work Thursday, I heard an NPR segment about actors and accents. This is all about Spanish accents, but I’d imagine this could lead to discussion about ranges of accents. Wherever the language you’re teaching is spoken, there are surely several distinct accents. Workup a lesson covering some of them and use this NPR bit as a lead in. For bonus points, put together a video with pieces of Touch of Evil, Scarface, and The Mask of Zorro. You compare fake Mexican, Cuban, and Spanish accents, picking specific scenes that show the quality of each actor’s pronunciation.
Listen And Repeat: Brrrrr…
I stumbled on this ten-minute film about the Cold War the other day. It ends up that it was a finalist for the Cannes 2006 online competition. B is for Bomb gives a quick run down on nuclear weapons, narrated by a young kid so it might not be as soporific as some other documentary narrators. Stop it at about five minutes if you see it as propaganda, because that’s just about the point where it starts to lean heavily toward opinion instead of fact. This is simplistic, but it puts your students in a position to understand the details of the Cold War. That’s five minutes well spent.
Nuclear Files and Original Child Bomb are promoted at the end of the film. I glanced at them both and one of them is clearly a resource teachers can use. But I’m not a social science teacher, so what do I know?
Download
Save it to your computer and show it whenever you want, with or without an internet connection, with or without an internet filter.