So Much to Learn...So Little Time

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

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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.)

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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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Mobiles in class...a wee success story

Result today at parent's evening...drift back in time 2 weeks...

A couple of weeks ago I set my S1 class the task of preparing a speaking test which would take the shape of me asking basic questions about themselves. To help them along I recorded these questions and added slides with the questions written out to form an enhanced podcast, which I promptly posted on my resources blog. However I also  bluetoothed the mp3 version to a couple of kids phones who then also passed it on to their mates in class...ALL UNDER THE PROVISO THAT IF I CAUGHT ANY OF THEM DOING ANYTHING ELSE THEIR PHONES WOULD BE CONFISCATED. As you can imagine they loved it. Those who didn't have that kind of phone I put it on either a usb drive, mp3 player or a blank cd. For those who so wished I also recorded myself saying their answers onto their phones / mp3 player. Were the results any better...I don't know as I don't have any comparative material BUT all those who availed themselves of the tech for learning said they enjoyed their learning more.

...back to today...

Parents evening, 2nd appointment, "wow, my such and such, really enjoyed using his phone to help with their speaking test...never stopped listening to it...". At least 6 parents brought this up, with no prompting from me, and the consensus was 100% positive and in favour.

Extrapolate that to a whole school, imagine if and enlightened Head / Authority were to actively encourage staff and pupils to use their tech in classrooms for learning purposes I am sure this would have the approval of many many parents. In my case they obviously saw (and heard) for themselves their kids gadgets being used in an educational manner. Whooppee!

Also this week my employers advice for use of mobile phones in schools came out:

It is accepted that in secondary schools the carrying of mobile phones to school is reasonable, provided the following code of practice, in conjunction with any individual schools behaviour policies, in regard to the use of mobile phones, is fully adhered to.

Where school policy allows the carrying of mobile phones into classrooms they must always be switched off during class times unless specific permission has been granted by the class teacher to allow the phone to be turned on.

Now I have to say that I find these 2 extracts (and the policy as a whole) quite well thought out and cognisant of the fact that kids have this stuff and would use it for learning if given half the chance. So "chapeau" to Aberdeenshire Coulcil for that one.

Why learn languages

I love this sildeshow for an assembly James Padvis has given (has to give) why it is importatnt to learn languages. I like the idea of the kids actually taking part in it rather that listening to a drone from the stage. It gives me some ideas for the European Day of Languages event we are planing for 26 September.

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Yours Truly Glowing on Edtechroundup 5

Edtechroundup is a regular online meeting of educationally, tech-related minds. Just about every Sunday a group of tech interested teachers get together, usually via Flashmeeting, to discuss technology and its place in the classroom.

Last Sunday I took part in a special edition where the topic under discussion was VLE's (Virtual Learning Environments) and GLOW. It was special because we were recording for a podcast. Much of what was discussed looked at how VLE's are being adopted in England, which despite my not having any experience of a VLE was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the insights from Ian Usher, who works for Buckinghamshire LEA.

However I got my chance, to bang on about GLOW. It's actually an extremely difficult concept to explain, and I'm not sure that I did it justice. But here's your chance to assess how I did. If you want to go straight to the Glow bit it comes in at just after 30 mins.

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Blogging CPD

After promising to do so for ages, I am hopefully going to do a bit of CPD with some colleagues this lunchtime. The topic: Blogs, and how to start one using typepad

I have put together a presentation in keynote (which now looks rubbish in ppt but oh well) and I also sent it to garageband and added some music so there's 2 versions.

During the session (only the first in a small series I hope) my colleagues will have the opportunity to set up their own blog under the school's account.  So fingers crossed that there will be someone there.

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ICT is Fun in Learning

Last week The Boss gave me an excuse to mess around with animoto again. He has to give a presentation to a cross service conference about the work the e-learning committee in Aberdeenshire's education service is doing. As his spot is in the death zone (afternoon, after lunch) he wanted something jazzy to represent why kids seem to like learning with ICT.

So he asked me, and I immediately thought of animoto. I was to do it from the secondary perspective and link it with a colleague's work in the primary.
Although fun to do it was a bit of a bind at times.

1. I recorded some of my pupils opinions on my Marantz pmd660
2. I wandered around school and took some pictures of kids in action with ICT on my Sony Ericsson k800i
3. imported audio files to garageband and edited the best bits
4. created some slides in keynote and exported them as jpeg images
5. used another garageband file to create a kind of dancey techno track

Then I got the stuff from a primary colleague. She had spent a good part of the day filming students in her school and asking why they like ICT. There are some wonderful quotes I wanted to use but unfortunately the audio on the mini dv was so corrupted as to barely useable. I only managed to salvage a few short bits about Google Earth. But this is what I had to do. I am sure some of it would have been easier with Quicktime Pro, but I don't have it...yet.

1. import video to iMovie HD
2. extract audio
3. scroll through film to find interesting bits
4. use grab to take screen shots
5. convert screenshots from TIFF to jpeg
6. select clips with salvageable audio
7. export to garageband
8. delete movie track leaving audio
9. open previous garageband file and import new audio and music tracks
10. mess around with levels and effects

Then I imported my image files and audio files to animoto and they did the rest.

Et voilà!

Get Up and GLOW

Anyone else noticed that there are more and more blog posts referencing GLOW . There's a movement afoot. It is starting to catch hold?

As I have stated before I think GLOW is so exciting. Scottish education is going to be a torch bearer for the world...and we don't need any blue tracksuited guards to protect us.

I have just spent 2 days mucking around on GLOW in my capacity as GLOW Champion for TGS. My impressions are that it is a wee bit "clunky" I can do most of the sort of things on it that I do on my blog (embeddding, hyperlinking etc) but in a slightly different way. And somethings are not all that easy to do, but nevermind.
There are many out there who will say, and who have said, that all the various functions of GLOW are already out there on the web so why replicate them. I say yes indeed they are, but they are not under one umbrella AND they are not as secure as GLOW.
Glow is a safe and secure environment to help teachers teach, learners learn and, hopefully, parents parent (not sure about the last one but I wanted to keep the double alliteration.) I am getting to grips with GROUPS. I already love MEET, not too fussed about MESSENGER but willing to be persuaded, PORTAL is a potentially superb source of info and a timesaver. LEARN is not yet up and running here in the 'shire but it could obviously be awesome.

Those are the things that ROCK, now for a couple of things that SUCK(ish). I am sure that being champion of GLOW is going to be a lot of work (consequently I will get 2 days cover a term for the next year to work on GLOW stuff) but I don't get a laptop, the mentor does (as well as getting paid to lead twilight sessions.) I have accepted all this in taking on the role but it got me to thinking how in this aspect the education system in Scotland lags behind my homeland (England). Doon sooth I would be paid extra for taking on a role such as this as a form of encouragement, here we do it because we want to and in the hope that if it goes well this will reflect well on our cv when wanting promotion at a later date. Yes I know we get paid slightly more than our colleagues in England but the promotion opportunities are few and far between now (especially with the advent of the F-word (faculties)).

But anyway, incoherent and slightly irrelevant to the post grumble over.

Here is my clarion call to Scotland's teachers.