Top Tools for Digital Creativity in MFL: St. Robert of Newminster, Washington

Today I was very lucky to attend a CPD session that was run by the Catholic Partnership South for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. Co-ordinated by Sara Crawshaw, the Catholic Partnership runs CPD sessions, enrichment activities and a whole host of other things for staff and pupils who work or attend Catholic School in the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. This particular event was for Heads of MFL and MFL teachers from the region.

In the morning we focussed on Ofsted and improving teaching of MFL, with a particular emphasis on independence. Sarah Brough and Sarah Sharpe both from County Durham LA inspired us with great ideas that work to help improve our pupils' indepence, particularly at KS4.

In the afternoon I was invited to run a "short" session on digital creativity in MFL. Below you can find my presentation that gives a whistle-stop tour of my current favourites in no particular order. I've also added links  mentioned in the presentation below that incase you can't access them from the slideshow. I know some people asked about having the powerpoint available to show their departments. You can do this either by downloading from the Slideshare site or it you're not sure about doing that follow this link to  be able to download the file from my Langwitch Language Resources Wiki.

Last night in preparation for the presentation, I asked MFLers on Twitter what their favourite Web 2.0 tools for MFL were and they posted their responses on a linoit, which you can view here (I'm unable to embed it, unfortunately but there is also an image of it at the top of this post). Favourite Web 2.0 Tools for MFL

I hope everyone found the session useful and many more find it useful viewing here.

Top tools for Digital Creativity in MFL

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

Websites that were mentioned:

For word clouds

• Wordle: http://wordle.net


• Image chef: http://imagechef.com


• Tagxedo: http://tagxedo.com

For making language walls

• Wallwisher: http://wallwisher.com


• Linoit: http://linoit.com

Voice recordings and collaboration

• Voicethread: http://voicethread.com


• Voki: http://voki.com


• Xtranormal: http://xtranormal.com

Cartoon makers

• Toondoo: http://toondoo.com


• Go animate: http://goanimate.com and http://domo.goanimate.com

Story telling

• Storybird: http://storybird.com


• For MFL Storybirds: http://mfl-storybirds.wikispaces.com

I'll add more when I remember them. If there are anythat I've missed please let me know and I will add them.

If you'd like some examples of how I have used some of these tools, please feel free to look around my school blogs and wikis:

Langwitch (blog that I ran at my last school)

Langwitch @ St. Michael's

Langwitch Wiki

Time to have your say

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On Thursday, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, announced the review of the Primary and Secondary National Curriculum in England. The Department for Education, apparently, wants our opinions and evidence about the National Curriculum...so now its our chance to give our views through the Call for Evidence.

Whether they decide to listen to us or not, I think it's still important that we give our views, as teachers, parents, students...infact anyone who has an interested in the education of our future generations, it maybe our only chance!

If you wish to contibute you can do so by following this link. You can do it either online, or download it as a word document and fill in a hard copy instead. I've already started mine and have found I have some pretty strong views, not only about my own subject buy also about every other subject on the curriculum! I just keep typing everywhere I can that I believe MFL should be statutory at Primary Level and that I would like Languages for All at KS4 but not  necessarily GCSE Languages for all! Maybe they'll get the message...eventually...