Hi, and welcome to the Capstone Project for the Learn English: Intermediate Grammar Specialization. For this project you are going to make an electronic scrapbook or portfolio using the grammar points that you've learned in the specialization. You'll also include explanations of the grammar points using your own words and you'll include examples of each grammar point from media such as websites, articles, signs, movies, or songs, almost anywhere that you can find language. You'll find the directions for this assignment on the course page. So after you watch this video, look for that and read again about the assignment. But basically, the assignment is to make a grammar scrapbook or portfolio. To do this, you'll need to choose a technology tool. This could be almost anything. You can make a video, you could make a blog, you could use an app on your smartphone or on your computer. You could use a website or you could look for an electronic portfolio, which is also on the Internet. This just depends on your preference. What kind of a scrapbook would you like to have after this course ends? Some examples of these tools are listed here. Explain Everything is an app for smartphones. You can use this to add pictures and text to make a presentation that can then be shared as a movie or a PDF or several other things. Wikipages are used to make websites, so you could create your scrapbook as a website. Voice Thread is a tool for making presentations online. Wordpress is used if you want to make a blog. Dropr is an electronic portfolio site. These are just a few examples of the many hundreds of things that you could use to create your capstone project. Feel free to be creative. If you know of another tool that would work, that's fine. You'll also need to go back through all of the grammar that was covered in this specialization. Your grammar scrapbook or portfolio must include between eight and twelve grammar points from this specialization. For each one, you will explain the rules using your own words. Once you find which grammar points you're going to use, you need to look for examples of each grammar point from the media. The examples should be interesting and fun. They could be from songs, movies, TV shows, they could be from celebrity interviews or athlete quotes. Anything that uses grammar. Keep in mind, this will be the step that takes you probably the longest. It will take some time to find good examples of your 8 to 12 grammar points. But don't get discouraged, just keep trying. Let me give you a few examples of the kind of media you could look for. Here's a video with an example of present perfect tense, it's from a song by U2 and you'll hear them singing, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. This uses present perfect tense. >> But I still haven't found what I'm looking for. [MUSIC] But I still haven't found what I'm looking for. [MUSIC] Here's an example of a photo. You can see this is from a person's cell phone, where they took a screenshot of a text conversation. And this conversation had several adjective clauses. Remember learning about adjective classes in the second course of this specialization? Here's an example that's an audio file, that means an mp3. You'll hear a superlative adjective used by HAL, who was the robot in 2001: A Space Odyssey. >> The 9,000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error. >> Did you hear the superlative? Here's an example of text from an article and there's a photo that goes along with it. Don't you think the photo makes it more interesting? Prince Harry said that the best birthday present for his grandmother, the Queen, would be to have a day off, so she could lie about and do nothing. This is an example of a tricky verb form from the third course in the specialization. Notice too that on each of these examples I'm telling you where I got the quote from or where I got the video from or where I got the audio file from. You must do that in order to prevent plagiarism, which is dishonesty. So you always have to say where you are getting your sources from. Be sure you do that in your portfolio. These are just informal citations where I put the website that I got it from. In a minute you will see how I more formerly cite these sources. You might be wondering why you have to do this kind of a project. Well, one of the reasons, the most important reason, is to review what you've learned in the three courses. You've learned a lot of grammar very quickly so you need something to make you think about it again before you go away from this specialization. You'll also find when you're looking for the examples that you are paying a lot of attention to the grammar in media. This will help you continue learning. You'll also start to be aware of other grammar. This will just make you a better English speaker. And finally, this will give you a chance to showcase what you have learned. You can show off all of your new grammar knowledge. And I hope you'll think it's fun. Here are the sources that I used in my presentation just now. These are all listed in MLA format. Remember, earlier I just put the website where I got the source from. Here, I'm being more formal using MLA format. You need to do both in your scrapbook. You can put just a website or the name of the person near the example, but at the end of your scrapbook you should also have a collection of all of your sources using a standard format MLA or APA. And I'll give you some resources later if you need help doing that. So, that's a quick explanation of what your capstone project is going to be. Go to the course page and look for the handout that you can read for more information. Good luck.
