So Much to Learn...So Little Time

Great moments with S2

My postings seem to be all about my S2 class at the moment, but they are doing such good and interesting work, with such gusto

I mentioned in recent tweet how happy I have been with them, particularly the standard of recent homework, but also the great work they've been doing in class. Due to their cooperation and sense of fun the recent series of lessons has been so enjoyable I thought I'd share them with you.

For those of you who know Métro 2 (Mod 2 Unit 4) we are looking at arranging to go out, using the conditional phrase "on pourrait". Since acquiring an IWB I've been finding an awful lot of super resources via TES Connect, but the one below is my favourite. I made a simple search using "on pourrait" as my keyword, filtering it through Modern languages. This gave me 17 different resources. I looked at 2 or 3 before I came to chocolatchaud's "Qu'est-ce qu'on pourrait faire?" PowerPoint.



What an brilliant idea...an Explosion of Ideas. Using the powerpoint I presented the idea of the "on pourrait + infintive" construction and gave each table group an A4 sheet with a photocopy of the spider diagram from slide 2. I then explained the task, emphasising that the ideas didn't have to be serious BUT they had to be in good (ok reasonable) French, and that they had to get as many as possible. On the board I put up a 15 minute countdown courtesy of e.ggtimer, and I gave them some background music ( a couple of tracks from Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk) which was not hugely appreciated but I kept it on anyway.

After the fifteen minutes were up the recorder's from each table went to another table and discussed and noted their ideas for 2 more minutes. On their return the groups then had to decide of their Top 5 activities.

Then I dropped the bomb...the next lesson they were going to find their perfect partner via Speed Dating. That caused no end of groans.

That evening I collated all the top 5's and drew up this table ready for the next lesson.

Speed Dating Sheet - Free Legal Forms

The lesson involved a major room reorganisiation which had the students puzzled on their arrival, but they soon got over it. Next came the tricky part of explaining what to do.

• in the column headed "moi" tick 5 fave suggestions
• put 1st partners initials in next column, ask "Qu'est-ce qu'on pourrait faire ce soir?"
• place a tick against each of partners 5 responses
• answer partners question with your 5 faves
• on signal move 1 place to the left and repeat process

At first I gave them 2 minutes using classtools.net timer, but as they got more confident we got it down to about 45 seconds per pair...serious speed dating. Here's a wee film I took whilst they were working, and as you can see each and everyone student was working away, and having a laugh along with it.



This took us almost to the end of the lesson but first they had to find their ideal partner by finding the best match from the responses gained during the exercise.

At the start of the 3rd lesson I dropped the second bomb, now they had to sit and work with their perfect partner. Cue serious groaning all around. The aim of this lesson was to introduce the idea of making excuses using "je ne veux / peux pas, parce que..." Again I resorted to TES Connect and found an excellent presentation by Cestrian to introduce the excuses. To this I added my own slide with an exemplar of the sort of dialogue I wanted them to produce. Here it was my turn to be proud of myself as I dicovered how to add sound to a ppt.



I then set them to work producing a dialogue in their pairs. This took longer than I anticipated because of various disruptions affecting the timetable, but we finally got it done.

Then we came to the culminating event...presenting the dialogues. Of course as soon as I mentioned the video camera the grumbles started. My initial idea was to have each pair do a sort of Alias Smith and Jones head-to-head, but then I had an even better idea (inspired I must say by Emma's homework). Why not get puppets to do the speaking for them.
They seemed to like this idea much better.

Here are the results:



In analysis the series of lessons took a little longer than I antcipated, but in some respects I wasn't able to control that. I really enjoyed this topic and the students have definitely had fun in the lessons. We didn't go into the grammatical explanations of "on pourrait + infinitive" but the students have used it in a question and in making a series of (ridiculous) suggestions. Most importantly they have worked with lots of other classmates and they have showed off their creativity and imagination both in thinking up strange activities and producing their dialogue.

As the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence approaches is it more of these kind of lessons we should be getting our learners to experience? Yes and no I think. On a simple physical and mental basis maintaining the kind of drive necessary for these lessons would be impossible everyday...and doing this kind of stuff everyday would render them becoming as stale as lessons in classes taught by those who have "taught the same thing successfully for the last 25 years and can't see why i should change now." However these kinds of lesson allow students to experience different kinds of learning (collaborative, direct teaching, experiential) and to allow their creative juices to flow. It also allows for something to be created at the end, i.e the film.

I'd be grateful for your thoughts.

languages, learning, edtech, lesson, french

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An A-Z of Good Practice Modern Language Teaching

Advance apologies to those who came to this post thinking it will answer all questions about MFL teaching...it will maybe help with some.

Today 80+ mfl teachers had a chance to meet up at an in service event organised by Aberdeenshire Council, and facilitated by Pat Young who, amonst other things, is involved in the LTS Virtual Advisory Service. Pat is a very personable presenter who had some very good ideas, which she had used in her own classroom.
Her session, An A-Z of Good Practice in Modern Language Teaching, was on the face of it an excellent opportunity for real sharing to go on. Unfortunately the presentation lasted all day and could quite easily have fitted into a morning.
Lots of interesting ideas were looking to burst out but we didn't really get the time to discuss and share. In my eveluation I suggested that a future model, and probably less expensive one, would be to invite all ML departments in all the shire schools to come up with 3-5 examples of good practice in their department and be ready, in true TeachMeet style, to deliver a 7 min / 2 min presentation on them should their name appear on the Random Name Picker. Why?

• teachers delivering in service to teachers is far more effective as we believe it
• cost effective, only travel expenses to pay out, no consulatncy fees
• every dept would have to have something prepared
• get teachers out of comfort zone of sitting and listening to presenters drone on...you might be next.
• should provoke discussion which could be carried on online (shock horror) afterward

Anyway, if you arrived here hoping, indeed, for an A-Z of good practice below is what the day produced. In black are those I came up with at the beginning, with very little cheating, the red is what Pat suggested. (Suggestions for others would be most welcome)

I was also asked an interesting question as well. View my enthusiasm for all things technological, whether or not I still have a place for the more traditional methods of language teaching? Of course, I answered. I do enjoy using fancy stuff but there still is time for text book work etc and I only try to use the tech to enhance my teaching and kids learning...that's the intention anyway.

A-Z of Good Practice in MFL - Get more Business Documents

Pic by Paperfaireys

Free Your Mind and Your Class Will Follow - The Slidecast @iowconference08

Here's a slidecast version of the talk I gave at IOW Conference 08. I'm looking at why blogs and podcasts have a natural home in the MFL classroom.

Free Your Mind And Your Class Will Follow : Using Blogs And Podcasts In The MFL Classroom

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: iowconference08 learning)

Mocked...but they quite liked it

I once again showed off my "singing" talent today, whilst rying to get my S2's to learn avoir.

I was mercilessly mocked...but I bet it will help them learn it they use it.

Too much tech...

Every year I say to myself that I should just ease into a new school year.

Every year I do precisely the opposite.

Not only do I, the Champion (along with my colleague Ed, the Mentor) have to get everyone in the school enthused and trained up with Glow (whilst learning it all again myself) I will have to learn how to use my Smartboard (when the bloody projector gets fixed.) And as someone who is inclined to use technology in his classroom I am obviously not wanting it to be a glorfiied Now I know Isabelle has done a lot of research on this and I have already started to delve into her del.icio.us, but I would be more that grateful for ant language related Smartboard links that you would like to send me.

PLEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAASSSE.

smartboard iwb glow

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Some nice videos from the Beeb, 'specially with my nice IWB

BBC - Learning Zone Clips Library - Secondary Search Results

BBC - Learning Zone Clips Library via kwout

Those nice people at the BBC have published a whole swathe of videos in their Learning Zone pages.

There appears to be a nice selection of ones in French and German, which I shall be hoping to use on my new IWB...when the projector decides to work.

languages bbclearning

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Guided Tours of Huntly in French

It seems ages ago that I blogged about an idea I had to get my S4 pupils to create resources that could, eventually with some finessing, become resources available to French speaking visitors to Huntly.

As usual the best laid plans never quite work out as intended, but we have managed to put together something. Preparation of this has been dragged out by trips, sports days, college taster days etc., etc and pupils have got fed up of me reminding them that page 131 of Equipe will be of invaluable assistance. The original idea was for the kids to record their guided visit, but time ran out. However, as is often the case a relatively simple solution presented itself via the web. Readthewords.com, a text to speech service which read english, french, spanish and german...and it free. I think the voice quality is not bad at all and the recording can be embedded or downloaded to an mp3 player perhaps.

The other part of the -plan was to create a google map for each group's tour. Sounds simple doesn't it? Well maybe not too simple, but something which should be do-able by "digital natives" (sorry Marc Prensky but this weeks lessons are proof positive that kids still have to be "taught" some of these skills, that they are not simply born knowing how to deal with these things.

Anyway, the first thing each group had to do was to create a google account. Quite straightforward if they have a personal email address accesible in school (hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc), impossible if relying on school email because the required verification message takes over 24 hours to navigate its way through the server filters. Next challenge was simply to use the interface. The screens in the ICT room were a bit on the small side and didn't make the task 0f positioning placemarkers all that easy.

Another challenge which needed a solution was that of photos. For IPR reasons I didn't want to (couldn't) use photos already on the web and each group needed photos of their places to visit to add to their map. I had wanted to send them out with their camera/phones and take their own pics, but on taking advice I found I would have needed 6-7 adults so ensure an adult accompanied each group...grrr! So what did I do? Got on my bike and killed 2 birds with one stone. I was going to do some training at lunchtime so I just did a bike ride around Huntly and took the pictures myself. I then uploaded them to drop.io. The beauty of dropio is that not only is it free (up to 100mb) but you can get embed codes for the pictures, but also I was able to write the instructions as a note added to the drop...not that any of the pupils actually seemed to read them, plus ça change.

Thus the kids were free to use photos which they could then embed on their placemarkers. Luckily (for me) no one got as far as adding lines on their map, because that can be a pain.

Having gone on about all the problems faced I am really pleased with the results. If time had allowed I would have spent more time in the computer rooms and gone through all the skills needed to do this before letting them start the task itself.

I'm not sure whether I was surprised or not but the girls engaged more with this activity. The boys were really quite frustrating at times, constantly opening up new windows to play games. When I asked whether they had ever done anything "creative" on their computers at home not many were able to answer yes, mostly content to play games.

As I said at the beginning the idea has not quite turned out as expected but here is an example of what one group created. Perhaps in the future, now I know the issues involved, my classes can produce a resource which visitors could access on their mobiles via the web so as to enable them to follow the maps and listen to the tours at the same time...I'm thinking it might be something my Higher class could get its teeth into when we get to this topic area.

Let me know what you think. How could this be improved on?

Here is what Sarah, Louise, Samantha and Katrina came up with. (Thanks to Juliett in Readthewords for her lovely voice.)

View Larger Map

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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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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: