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Thursday 22 January 2009

Training at Carmel

I was lucky enough to be invited to Carmel RC Technology College on Tuesday to speak to the MFL department about blogging and using Audcity. It was really nice to be asked by our PGCE student from last year who is have a very successful NQT year there now.
I always get very nervous before going to speak anywhere so it was really calming to be greeted by such a friendly team of teachers.
I spoke briefly about blogging and how it can be used with pupils to improve motivation, to show off their work, to communicate with them outside of school and even for that new "buzz" phrase of AfL. They all responded really positively and were keen to find out more.
We looked at several blogs that are used by MFL teachers with their classes such as:


Moving on we then looked at some blogs written by Modern Linguists that give an insight into using technology in our teaching and generally give us motivation to be adventurous and creative with our classes. In particular we looked at:


I also pointed out to them that there are several other excellent blogs out there that they can read and get great ideas from.
We discussed how to set up a blog, including blogging platforms, what the purpose of a blog could be and how simple and straight forward it can be to set up a blog and create the contect. I pointed out that if I can do it, then anyone can!
We also spent a little time looking at how to create posts and how to embed a You Tube video into your blog...all this in 1hr!
Next we moved to their computers and learnt how to use Audacity and create Vokis and talked about how Vokis could be used to do speaking assessments and, following José Picardo's
example how they could be used in AfL, with pupils assessing one anothers' work via the comments in a blog.
By the end of the session, it was obvious that there was the usual "information over load" but also that many members of the department were keen to go away and consider how they could used a blog with their pupils and also how they can move into creating soundfiles with pupils and makeing Voki with them.
It was definitely time well spent and I felt that the session was a great success.

Here is the slideshow that I used:

A Beginners’ Guide To Using Ict Creatively
View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: cpd mfl)

2 comments:

  1. Grüß dich Helena,

    Sounds as if it was a cracking session. I've got some training events coming up and am very keen to avoid overloading the attendees, but on the other hand I need to ensure they get their money's worth... any thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Grüß dich Helena,Sounds as if it was a cracking session. I've got some training events coming up and am very keen to avoid overloading the attendees, but on the other hand I need to ensure they get their money's worth... any thoughts?

    ReplyDelete