Royal Ontario Museum

A very special museum

The Royal Ontario Museum, known as the ROM, is one of Canada's premier museums with an international reputation for excellence. It houses an outstanding collection and also features major exhibitions from around the world.

A new wing made of glass was added to the traditional older building. The museum contains collections covering a great variety of periods from all over the world.

The City of Toronto. *Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum* (CC BY)

At the end of the session, you will have:

discovered the Royal Ontario Museum.
learnt how to express imaginary situations and their consequences using the second conditional.
started your collaborative Google Site in groups about the city of Toronto.

Visit the official Royal Ontario Museum website and take a look at the Google Art Project at this museum. Over 300 artifacts have been captured in extraordinary detail on this Project, which allows all visitors to virtually tour the galleries and the possibility to curate their own digital collections.

Which is your favourite? Which has impressed you the most? Send a tweet with the URL of the piece of art you have liked the most. Remember to use the hashtags of this Project. Continue with your posts on Twitter (#taskadvice and #EDIAtoronto). The 'Rubric to assess a Tweet' can help you do a good job in this social network.

Remember that the Royal Ontario Museum must be part of the route on your Google Sites map.

If I were you, I would visit this city

After finishing this project, you will have a full range of possible Canadian cities to visit in the future. As each of you has to search for information of a different Canadian city or town, you are also going to provide the readers of your guides with some recommendations at the digital presentation that you will design with the digital website Genial.ly.

How can we express some of these imaginary situations and their consequences in English? One of the resources available in English is the use of the so-called second conditional.

The second conditional structure is used to talk about imaginary situations and the consequences.

Example: If I had a plane ticket, I could visit Canada.
(But the truth is, I do not have a plane ticket, and I cannot visit Canada).

The second conditional structure is also used to talk about imaginary abilities and the consequences.

Example: If I could speak Chinese, I wouldn’t need a dictionary.
(But the truth is, I cannot speak Chinese, and so I need a dictionary.)

As you can see in the previous sentences, the structure of the second conditional is not difficult at all. After getting familiar with this new structure, do some activities about it: exercise 1, exercise 2 and exercise 3.

Challenge: English-speaking cities

Challenge Step 1: Open up a new Google Site and share it with your group

The challenge in this project is a Google site about English-speaking cities. In this challenge, we are going to work in groups of 2/3 people. The first step is to create the site using google sites.

The rubric to evaluate a google map will be used to evaluate your work. Remember that you have to evaluate it once you have finished creating the route with the ten stops of each city.

You can have extra help watching the following video about registering and using Google Sites.

Bradley Lands. Google Sites Tutorial for Education (CC BY)

One of the members of the group is going to be the leader and is going to open up the site and share it with the rest of the members of the group. Thus, the other members will be able to edit the site as well.

It is now time to start working collaboratively with your group. In order to manage your work you can these steps:

After having created the site, check that the whole group can edit it and start designing a landing page with the title English -Speaking Cities.
In this first page, you have to describe what your group is going to create collaboratively: a website with information about 10 of the most important English - speaking cities in the world, one city per project. In this project, we are going to work with the city of Toronto.
If you have created the google site previously, using another project from this series, you only have to add a new page to your Google site.
As you have to work in groups of 2/3 people, you can also use the website linoit.com to brainstorm your ideas, collect your links and reach an agreement on which digital materials you are going to use at your Google Site for Toronto even though you are working at different places.

Remember to always follow all the steps. That way it will be easier for you to produce the final product of the challenge. Your teacher can always help you with all your doubts.

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