Internet Reciprocal Teaching

I really enjoyed the PowerPoint about Internet reciprocal teaching because it reminded me of a number of activities I did as a student in high school, some of my favorite classroom activities of my high school career. Fortunately, we did these activities in my French class, among others, so I have a idea of what this would look like in a foreign language classroom. Granted, I was participating in the activity as a student so I wasn't thinking critically about its importance at the time, but I can say that as a student it was an activity that helped me really engage the class because it allowed me to research topics, find things that I found personally interesting and present them back to my classmates.

I think this is an approach that has the potential to help a lot of students because, first, they tend to enjoy hands-on activities, and second, because it allows for a certain amount of creativity depending upon the exact parameters of the activity. My teacher, for example, gave us some vague (in a good way) guidelines about what we could research online, and it was up to us to find something that interested us, something that we would create a presentation about and enthusiastically describe and explain to our classmates. A lot of students talked about aspects of French history that they liked, others looked up current events in news articles from Francophone Web sites. 

In general, it's a great way to implement technology into the classroom, and what's most important is that it's meaningful! Students will gain some knowledge by doing the research and will be able to practice speaking and writing for the presentation portion.