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

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And Phonik!

Phonik

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