Assignment: Foreign debate

This is part of a series suggesting different ways to use Moviestorm in schools or other educational environments. They also make useful exercises for film-makers wanting to develop and practice different film-making techniques. Many more lesson plans and ideas, with free downloadable resources, can be found on the Moviestorm Web site.

Assignment: Foreign Debate
Create a TV-style discussion in a foreign language, highlighting different views about a particular topic.

Suggested techniques

Pick a topic that’s relevant to the country whose language is being spoken. This could be sports, politics, social affairs, or entertainment.

Have a panel of people representing different viewpoints.

Intersperse the presentation with still images and video if appropriate. You could do this as a studio presentation or lecture, and display the images on a screen behind the presenter, or else you can make the images go full-screen.

Add extra content on-screen by using text to complement what you’re saying.

For teachers: benefits to students

• The student is required to demonstrate fluency with the words required to describe topical events.
• The student has to find out a little about the country they’re learning about. Their choice of topic can then lead on to classroom discussion. Adding multimedia content enables the student to approach the subject in a richer way than just using written text and still images.

Suitability

• Ages 14+
• Suitable for groups
• Languages

Downloadable resources

Click the link to download a Moviestorm movie template.

cloud.moviestorm.co.uk/Lesson_Plans/Debate.zip

Installation instructions:

Download the file and extract the zip folder to this location:

Vista, Windows 7, Macs: [Username]/Moviestorm/Movies

Windows XP: C:/Documents and Settings/[Username]/Moviestorm/Movies