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!

Songsmith

Whilst at the MFL Show and Tell, Joe Dale told us about Songsmith (I'd read his blogpost about it before but I'm an Auditory / Kinaesthetic learner...) and was filled with possibilities and ideas. I couldn't wait to find the opportunity to use it. Fortunately that opportunity showed itself soon than I'd imagined.

My Year 8 German class had been making "Haben" raps the week before and hadn't got very far with them at all so I felt that the injection of Songsmith would be really beneficial.

As Songsmith is on my laptop and downloading anything onto a school computer is difficult as I don't have administrator rights (and rightly so!) I decided we'd have a carousel-type activity. I split the class into groups of 3 and set up my laptop with a microphone in my office, gave a quick tutorial and we were away!

After they were recorded I popped them onto the Levelator and made podcasts out of them. They can all be found on my Langwitch school blog but I really liked this one best from "RP, BW, BS":

RP, BW, BS

Langwitch Radio