Guest Author

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Last week I received a message from José Picardo, asking whether I would contribute to a series of posts written by guest authors that he was planning for his blog Box of Tricks. As it's the Christmas holidays and I'm low on ideas, I decided that it was a good opportunity to expand on a post that I'd already written on this blog and give more information about what I'd written about in the previous post, so I chose to write about my Top Tools for getting pupils Talking.
The post I wrote on Box of Tricks can be found here: Tools to get pupils talking

There are several other MFL bloggers who have already contributed to this interesting series or are to write something in the near future. So far you can read posts on there from Amanda Salt, Isabelle Jones, Simon Howells, Dominic McGladdery and Marie-France Perkins with many more to come.

A year of perfect vision

A year ago today I had laser eye surgery that gave me better than 20/20 vision. I opted for the LASIK-wavefront treatment and at the time I was really worried that I'd done the wrong thing, as the first few days were rather unpleasant-painful, sore eyes and less than perfect vision (although my vision was good enough not to have to wear glasses, even then!). Over the following weeks, I wore my plasic eye guards to sleep in and followed all the instructions and within hardly any time at all I had forgotten that I ever wore glasses.

A year on I can categorically say that it is one of the best things I've ever done. My vision is perfect and I don't have to contend with uncomfortable glasses and swapping them for sunglasses at inconvenient times. I love being able to see at the hairdressers, when I'm putting my makeup on and when I go swimming. I love not having to keep pushing my glasses back up my nose every couple of minutes and I love my glasses not steaming up whenever I open the oven door!!

The only down-side is, now I can't get away from the bags under my eyes and the concealer gets ever thicker, as ends of terms approach. In addition, I had looked forward to buying myself some cool designer sunglasses in the summer...it was rather disappointing therefore this year to have bought 3 different pairs of sunglasses and still be unhappy with them. I rather think I must be too picky!

I still wake up on a morning and reach for my glasses though...

TeachMeetNE09-02

On Wednesday 2nd December Chris Harte and team organised the second TeachMeetNE of the year at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle.
After a hectic journey up the A19 (with a huge delay due to a broken down car!!!) we arrived in good time for the start of proceedings.
Then event was extremely well attended and, as ever the Tyneside Cinema proved to be an excellent location, with wine flowing freely throughout the evening.
There were some amazing presentations by some very amusing and knowledgeable colleagues from the local area and we also had colleagues join us from around the world via Flashmeeting.
I spoke about my top tools to get pupils talking and the presentation is below. Underneath the presentation you will also find links to examples of the tools that I spoke about. It's so important for we linguists to get our pupils talking and improving their foereign accents but it was really interesting to see that non-linguists were also interested in how they could use some of these tools with their pupils.

Voki: from our eTwinning Project

Voicethread: Very basic-I'm sure you could come up with something much better!

Songsmith: Haben chants

Slideshare: My French Jolly Phoniques Slidecast

Podcasts: Langwitch Radio (German) Radio Langwitch (French)

More information about the TeachMeet09-02 event can be found on the Ning.

Finally I'd like to say thank you to Rosemary for giving me a lift, thus making sure I didn't need to drive into central Newcastle!