Lolcatz Phenomena Harnassed for Language Teaching

First, please vote on my Year 8 students' lolcatz photos here, and then I'll explain all about how I used this in my lesson below (after all the photos!)

In language classrooms we're always trying to stimulate communication.

Lolcatz is an internet phenomena you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat In very brief, it involves putting a cute quote on the bottom of a photo of a cat, in a weird version of broken English that we imagine a kitten might use (but it is implicitly a parody and a version of the broken English people use on the internet, in text messages etc). LOL stands for Laugh Out Loud.

There's countless lolcat images here.

You can make your own lolcat images and even share them with the world here.

Did I mention this thing is so popular that the nameless hordes on the internet have translated most of the bible, including the boring bits, into lolcatz? http://www.lolcatbible.com http://www.lolcatbible.com

And that's what I'm about to do with my Year 8 French students. I've just found a voting website which should allow me to upload their photos and then insert the voting system on this blog post: http://www.polldaddy.com

Why work this way?

The students will hopefully enjoy having a big audience 'out there' and not 'in here' judging their work. Should 'up the ante' with the quality of what they do. They'll make lots of photos and we'll just upload their best shot. HERE WE GO!

SO HOW DID IT GO:

I've just finished the lesson! It was a manic 60 minutes, but they got going, made lots of lolcatz, and then sent me their best one. I had to stay behind an extra 15 minutes to upload them to the polldaddy.com website, and now I've just embedded the poll into this post!

In one week I'll give the students prizes depending on the votes!