Four times a year the sack of Jugend Scala magazine
would arrive in school. The magazines would be given out and occasionally one would
study a text with a class to practise reading skills. The feeling of guilt that
these high quality pieces of work were not fully utilized was unbearable-not to
mention the thought of the number of trees cut down to provide them. Well Juma came
along to replace Jugend Scala and now it has been on the net for a couple of years on www.juma.de So what will you find there and how do you use
it?An attractive image map awaits you on the Home Page
taking you off to Neu, the latest edition or Archiv for the last two years numbers.
Juma has improved its way of doing things considerably. The first
editions had to be downloaded by Adobe Acrobat and you didn't really know what you were
getting until the download had finished. Now you can read a text version with a
couple of sample photos before you decide whether you want the magazine article as it
appears on paper in pdf format (portable document format). This also enables you to
edit the texts and adapt them slightly for the abilities of your own classes.
As with the paper version Tip is also available with background
material and ideas for exploitation for teachers.
If you don't know how to install Adobe
Acrobat which is a special program to enable you to read pdf files (portable
document format) get a computer whiz to install it for you from one of the many free CDs
that come with computer magazines. Adobe Acrobat is also the program needed to read
Inspection reports from Ofsted's site so it is extremely useful.
The way Juma is presented really is the green way and each
article is described in detail with the pdf form, and of course you can read the whole
version anyway as previously mentioned. You only need to download what you think
will be useful-remember pdf documents are fairly big taking 300-500k if they have lot of
pictures. It would be a good idea to create a GCSE folder in your My Documents area
and then give each area of the syllabus its own folder then you could build up a library
of appropriate reading materials. Why not then try doing multichoice questions with
them using the free Hot Potatoes programs described elsewhere on
this site.
There are now two years of Archive material, that's 8 editions of
Juma and the first edition of 1999 is out. This really is one of the most useful
language teaching materials anywhere. You must visit!!
Visit the Goethe
Institute site in Dublin to get more exploitation ideas and questions on some of the
texts.
