Yesterday I felt extremely lucky to invited to take part in the Routes into Languages New Ambassadors' training even at UCL. For those who don't know who Routes into Languages are, they are a fantastic organisation who work via various regional universities to promote languages is schools. In particular they have Student Ambassadors who go into schools to promote languages or run workshops at their universities, all with the aim of increasing uptake at all levels of language learning.
After an early start with a 6.08 am train from Yarm (who knew that time existed on a Saturday) I arrived in a wet London and took part in my first activity for the day. Alongside 4 other fellow linguists, I was part of an employability panel. Each of us spoke about our passion for languages and where that has taken us in our careers. I have to say I did feel a little uneasy as "just a teacher", following a business consultant who had loads of experience in lecturing and working all over the world using her languages and someone who worked as a translator with the European Commission and had worked as GCHQ and being followed by a journalist who worked for the BBC World Service. However I managed to make them laugh and, I think, convince them that teaching wasn't full of lazy, good-for-nothings who are only in the job for the holidays, as some would have people believe and that actually teaching is a great profession to be in. So, I survived the employability panel (which, just for the record was 100% better than having a lesson observation!) and we moved to the afternoon session.
I ran a workshop on Social Media and ICT in MFL. I wanted the session to be as interactive as possible so spoke for very little of it and created a wiki with all of the information for the session on it. The wiki can be found here and you can find presentation and everything else from the afternoon there.
All in all, it was a fantastic day. I met some brilliant people and it was nice to be in the company of so many people with such a passion for languages and all of the opportunities that they can open up for you.
