Thursday, February 4, 2021

Online shopping activity template

Once upon a time I needed a book that was written in English but published by a German press. It was before Google Chrome/automatic site translation, so there was no just translating the page. I didn't speak any German, but I was able to successfully order the book by copying and pasting a few essential phrases into a translator, and using my existing knowledge of how online shopping works. 

We're currently in our house unit in Spanish 2, and I thought one useful skill for students to have would be to navigate a Spanish shopping website. So I picked a website (IKEA Spain), made a shopping list, set a budget, created a spreadsheet that tracks their budget, and created a slide presentation for them to copy and paste photos of their items in. 

This activity could work with a lot of different topics...if I have time, I will make one for school supplies, clothing, toiletries, and anything else I can think of. In addition to the benefit of having students navigate a Spanish-language website, it also exposes dialectal differences. For example, my students were confounded when a search for "refrigerador" only turned up one item, but when I told them to try "nevera" (a more commonly-used word for "refrigerator" in Spain), they had a lot more options. Most students really enjoy it, and if you make your shopping list long enough (like furnishing an entire house), it's an activity that can take most or all of a class period. 

If you have Google Classroom or Canvas with Google Assignments integration, it's incredibly easy. Just copy my slides presentation and spreadsheet into your Google Drive, and then make an assignment that makes a copy for each student. If you don't have those, you can copy them to your drive and make them visible to but not editable by students. Post the link and have students make their own copy of each document, and then submit the link to the finished products.

Here is my Google Slides template.

Here is my Google Sheets budget

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