So Much to Learn...So Little Time

The Pipers Trail

The Pipers Trail stopped off in Huntly today.

The Pipers Trail is a musical and theatrical showcase featuring the Pipes and Drums of the Army and along the 470 mile trail from lerwick to Edinburgh there will be opportunities for folk to take part. It features the story of a young lad who runs from Shetland in order to become the world's greatest piper.

Maybe as an educationalist it is unpopular and even taboo to mention the British Army favourably, seeing as how even my own union voted to stop them visiting schools for fear that they might be recruiting. I believe that the army performs a major role in society and is not simply a war machine as some more liberal people seem to think. For many youngsters the army has provided and will continue to provide a stable "family" where they can develop skills and personal characteristics which perhaps they would not have been able to do in civilian society...for whatever reason.

Anyway my point is that in the introduction to the presentation by the pipers and actors the officer mentioned that the presentation represents some of the qualities the army tries to instill in its soldiers: courage, respect, loyalty, discipline, selfless commitment.

I thought about how I wish some of our leaders, both political and closer to home would show some of these qualities. Those of you closer to home will know what I mean.

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Boys and Languages

After a month into the new timetable I can say that I am very happy with my S3 German class.

Through a mixture of timetabling and us sorting out classes it so happened that a class of boys sprang out of nowhere. It wasn't planned as some great educational experiment, it has just happened. And I'm really enjoying the class at the moment.

It is a mixed ability class with and a wide range thereof. Some of the boys like contributing voluntarily, but some will only do so when asked. They enter the class and get ready and they get down to work quickly. There is a real workng atmosphere in the class. One boy's mum who I know quite well said that her son is really enjoying the class because there are no girls to distract them... I'm not saying this is a reason for separating the sexes but it does make you think.

Anway we had a lot of fun this morning sending my vocab podcast to phones via bluetooth (shhh don't tell the Rector), mainly laughing at some of the names they have given their phones (I H8 fish, Ginger 4ever or Caravan of Tinkies!!!!!).
We then worked on some basic "at the doctors" dialogues with a view to having the boys perform.

Not one of them whinged when I brought out the video camera and set up the "doctor's surgery". Every pair wanted to have a go. They all really enjoyed themselves. Particular congratulations to Martyn who through the magic of television performed his role play on his own.

Here are the results.



As an addendum, i noticed that José has been writing about similar experinces with his class of boys...although his was far more planned than mine. But I feel we are experiencing similar results.

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Really making use of the tech that kids bring to school

I got to thinking the other day in my register class as one of the students pulled out his iPhone, other mobile and iPod.
Although this pupil was a bit of an exception to the norm, most kids have a mobile phone on them at least.

I have already had my students using them to help vocab learning via simple audio files, but I wanted to go further and allow them to see either a picture which illustrates the vocab or the word itself.
Here is my solution:

• i recorded the audio in garageband
• i typed the vocab items onto slides in keynote
• i set the garageband file playing whilst recording the keynote slideshow (I could simply have narrated but it wouldn't have had the music)
• Hey presto a narrated vocab slideshow which I then exported to quicktime
  

I now needed to convert this in somehow to an acceptable format for mobile phone (3gp). My first idea was to use youconvertit.com to simply transcode the .mov file. This didn't work as the 3gp option isn't available for this conversion. I then thought I'd try to convert it from an online file, so I uploaded to blip.tv. BUT youconvertit isn't compatible with blip.tv urls. However with blip I was able to download an flv version. Using this I was then able to convert to 3gp...unfortunately this didn't work very well, the file was corrupted somewhere...and it was all getting a bit complicated.

THEN it dawned on me . Ok so it cost me £20, but it will be worth it. It worked like a dream. I just opened the .mov file and then exported it as a 3gp file. The reason why I say it will be worth it is that now I will be able to convert all the vocab guide podcasts ( which I want to redo) to mobile phone files to give out to students.

Result!






And here's the proof...sort of.

In case you are interested the film is below in the previous post.

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Was ist los mit dir?

Click to Play

Peer and Self Assessment

A while ago my now S2 French class had to undergo the dread of speaking assessments, which I had the temerity to record and post on my Rate My Mates blog.

Of course being a consumate professional I didn't merely record and post them just to nark my students, the idea was to introduce the idea of peer and  self assessment.

After recording and with no editing I posted the tests to podomatic and embedded the player on the post. I also uploaded the worksheet I had given them in class, to use as a reminder.

Peer Assessment Checklist - Get more College Essays

Having done that I took some time out of one lesson to explain what is meant by peer assessment and what I wanted the students to do. As IT access en mass with headphones in our place is rather impossible, and the podomatic flash player doesn't work, and you can't download mp3 files I set the task as homework.

Obviously not all the students had suitable net access at home, so I had to use a variety of strategies to ensure that they were all able to do the work, including recording the tests on cd, or putting them onto flash drives. To my pleasant surprise everybody did the homework.

But to my greater pleasure the quality of comments on each other's work is very high. Go to the actual post to see them all but here's a selection. (Including all the interesting spellings)

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I wanna go Higher

For the first time (ever) in my teaching career I have a senior class of my own. Naturally I have to get them involved in creating stuff to assist their learning.

Inspired by and en hommage to Mark Pentleton's Verbcast my students have put together podcasts about regular verbs in the present tense.

Three groups, three very different attempts. What do you think of them? I think they all serve their purpose, but interestingly they reflect the different characters and personalities in the class. There's the serious one on -er verbs, a very verbcasty one on -ir verbs and a plain off the wall -re verb one.

Listen to them all.

Regular -er verbs:

Regular -ir verbs:

Regular -re verbs:

Curse of the Black Gold

Whilst the oil companies are coining it in around the world, there are millions of people suffering at their hands. Why are the exploitation conditions not the same in the North Sea as the Niger Delta?

Click the link below to watch a powerful film by photgrapher Ed Kashi, who looks at 50 years of oil in the Niger Delta and the effect it has had on Nigerian society and environment.

Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta

My Word(le)

Wordle is a fun new tool being bandied about the edublogosphere. Here's what mine looks like.

Guess what I'm interested in...not sure about the "imported" tag. I'm due a good sort of my del.icio.us account.

S1 Country Dancing Competition

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The annual interhouse country dancing competition. Pupils choreograph their own dances according to certain specifications, as listed at the end of the film.

TGS Sports Day 2008

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I'm quite proud of this one as I did the music myself. I was looking for a kind of funky summery kind of groove that had that "Soul Limb0" - Booket T. and the MG's (former BBC cricket theme) feel. I'm way off being a Garageband maestro but I just mucking around with it.

I think the girls doing the interviews were absolutely brilliant. They appear at ease in front of the camera and obviously enjoyed it.