International School Award

Back in January, it was suggested to me that I went to the ISA briefing meeting in London "as I was involved in a lot of the projects in it so would be good for me to know what to put in". A month later, no longer an innocentl by-stander in our bid to gain the Full International School Award, I was launched into compiling the whole portfolio.

For those who don't know, in order to gain the Full ISA you need to complete an Action Plan in September/October of all of your international, curricular-based projects that are taking place within that school year. This is then (hopefull) approved by the "ISA people" and then you spend the academic year gathering evidence of your 7 (minimum) "Key Activities", which  includes things like evaluations from pupils, staff and parents of events, photographs, samples of pupil work. All of this gets put together in a (very large) file and is then dispatched to the British Council in time for the deadline date, some time around the end of the school year. Simples...?

Or maybe not! It took over my life, the file went everywhere with me, I had evaluation forms coming out of my ears and chasing those evaluation forms, well...

However, in Ocotber I learnt that the hard work had paid off and we had been successful in our bid to be awarded the Full ISA - hurrah!!!

[caption id="attachment_323" align="alignleft" width="210" caption="Alistair Armstrong receiving our ISA from George Alagia"][/caption]

The Award Ceremony took place in London on Friday 16th October and was presented by George Alagia and you can see our award being presented on the left. Those of you who know me will know that I have dramatically changed over the last few months...unfortunately I was ill in bed and couldn't attend the ceremony, so one of our Assistant Heads went in my place.

What I didn't realise was that, alongside the certificate we received, we are also the proud owners of an ISA flag which is now flying on one of the school flagpoles and a beautiful crysal. I could take a picture of the crystal today but not the flag as it was dull and raining all day.

[caption id="attachment_324" align="aligncenter" width="210" caption="Our ISA Crystal"][/caption]

Aaarrrggghhh Twitter nightmare.

On Wednesday, in my silliness and probably due to my illess, I stupidly clicked a link to a video that came via a DM on Twitter. I very soon found out that it was a phishing scam, that it had sent out DMs to all my followers with the same link and that my account was now completely messed up. I had to keep logging into my account and from time to time I'd be locked out, I couldn't sent DMs to anyone as I had filled up my quota for yesterday with the nearly 400 that had been sent etc, etc... The final straw came yesterday morning when I again tried to login in and Twitter didn't even recognise my username of Langwitch or my email address. Enough was enough! I decided to take a big step and re-invent myself as @helenalangwitch - same picture, similar name, same silly tweets that people have come to know and love! However, before the end of the evening my old account came back to life! Don't know how and don't know why, so I've decided to remain @langwitch for the foreseeable future(I like the name and think she's fun much more fun that @helenalangwitch anyway). I will keep the other account for emergencies, or who knows I may become one of those people who only follows celebs with that account - can't see as it would be very interesting though ;o)

Anyway, I henceforth promise never to do anything silly like clicking on dodgy links in the future and apologise for confusion caused. I am sure the combination of medications I'm taking at the moment must in some way have contributed to the sorry state of affairs I found myself in, but that's a whole other blog post!

Finally I also want to say thank you to my wonderful PLN for you understanding and for following @helenalangwitch in my time of need.

Phonics, slidecasting and podcasting

Over the last year I feel like I've neglected the things that started on me on this journey that has revived my enthusiasm for teaching MFL - namely my school blog Langwitch and podcasting. However, over the last week I have begun to revive them, slowly but surely.
Through the wonders of Twitter I have come to know Suzie Bewell, SSAT Lead Practitioner for MFL from All Saints Language College in York. She has worked a lot with her pupils teaching phonics to improve pronunciation and has seem great improvements. With this in mind I trawled Amazon over the summer holidays and found a Jolly Phoniques manuel which was more or less identical to the kind of thing my 4 year old son was doing last year at Nursery (he's very bright, you know-he's now writing essays!)
Once I'd got over the initial shock of being back at work I decided to embark upon teaching my Jolly Phoniques. As I teach French and German (yes, I know and Spanish and ICT...) I felt it important to do justice to both languages, so I set to work on the German as well as the French. For my German, I took as my inspiration a resource that I found on Suzie's Wiki Do Once and Share and adapted it for my needs and for my French I used the Manuel Jolly Phonique all the way. The pupils so far have received it well - particularly my Year 10 class, whose pronunciation, to be quite honest was dreadful! We do lots of chanting with actions and spend lots of time going over actions when we get to tricky words that need a reminder of how to pronounce them and it seems to be working well.
Next is where the blog revival comes in! (Just incase you were wondering!)
I got to thinking how I could help my pupils even more with their pronunciation and began to wonder about making a slidecast, using the PowerPoint I'd used in class, together with the classes chanting. Never having done a slidecast before, I was nervous. However, I went onto Slideshare and just followed the instructions. I uploaded the PowerPoint, uploaded the mp3 soundfile (which I mangaged to improve the quality of, after they were initially too quiet, using the Levelator, as recommended by Joe Dale) and syncronised it all, just as I was told. I think the results are great - and if I can do it, anyone can!
Next I decided that my pupils could also do with even more practice so I create (re-vamped) 2 podcasts - one for French (Radio Langwitch) and one for German (Langwitch Radio), to avoid confusion - so that they can download their chants and pretend to be cool listening to music when they're really practicing their French and German! Of course everything is now on my school blog for my pupils to use and enjoy with the whole family.

Les Jolly Phoniques

Les Jolly Phoniques

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

And Phonik!

Phonik

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.