As promised yesterday, here's some more information about my 'Google' lesson. After doing the Google Quiz, I showed my EM Normandie students some clips from the 2013 movie The Internship. The movie as a whole is pretty rubbish, but it does contain a few good scenes which are usable in class (the meeting where Billy and Nick get fired, the Skype interview, discovering the Googleplex, the integration seminar), especially if you have a version subtitled in English (I've got a DVD). You can find the transcript for the Skype interview scene below in this Word file. Watch the video, then continue reading below.
LESSON NOTES
1. Google is famous for its tricky interview questions, one of which is featured in the scene above. I stopped the video at 52s and got my students to say what they would do if they were stuck in a blender. I then showed the rest of the scene. As a follow-up group discussion activity, I took a few more questions from the book Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? and put them in this PowerPoint (which also has the quiz and some other images that can be used for discussion purposes). I displayed the questions using a videoprojector and got the students to discuss each one in turn, giving feedback based on the suggested answers in this PDF.
2. To finish the lesson, I used this Google crossword. But rather than just getting the students to complete the crossword individually (or in pairs/groups), I cut the crossword up, giving the empty grid to one student, the clues to another, and the answers to a third. They then had to collaborate verbally (no looking at each other's information!) to fill in the grid. The role of the student with the solution is to help the other two if they get stuck, or to confirm that they have the right word. I find that doing it this way leads to a lot more discussion.
