A bear named Michel...or Michael, maybe!

Some of you may remember Michel le Voyageur who had many adventures around Europe though an eTwinning project last year. He was French and had a wiki that was updated as he travelled round Europe. Upon arrival back home in Billingham, he sat in my classroom and was admired by all who gazed upon him.

I feared that Michael was getting bored by February as my classroom isn't always the most stimulating place to be all day everyday, as the worksheets come out :)

One day, my lovely Year 10s gave me an idea. Some of them were heading to Iceland on a Science trip at half term. They asked whether Michel could accompany them. He did and had a great time going to glaciers, causing trouble and even gaining a companion in the shape of a (cuddly) puffin! Upon his return from Iceland, Michel seemed restless and told me he needed a change so, I kindly obliged.

He has had a (small) name change and is now known as Michael der Reisende and he has a blog.  This blog, however is not written by me, it is written by members of my Y8 German class.  Each week, one of them will take Michael home and blog about what he has done.  I hope that this will help improve their writing skills and also keep them interested in German.  It also gives them the opportunity to have a real audience for their writing in German - normally only I get to see it...and SLT when they do work scrutiny.

Posterous is brilliant for class blogging, as you can set up the account so that anyone can email a post in and you just have to approve it.  No logging in,  no passwords to forget, just an email address to send to. The class seem really interested in the project and he has already had one blog post written, with many comments.  I'm looking forward to reading about what else he does.

What's also nice is that he seems to be gaining a network of other cuddly travellers along the way as well.

Do you have a mascot that blogs in a foreign language or goes home with pupils? If so let me know and I'll share with Y8, they would love to see what other classes are doing.

Poor neglected blog...

It seems like ages since I last wrote a post here and I have to admit that this isn't realy a post at all. It's just say how neglected this blog is feeling at the moment.

Over the last year I haven't really found that much to blog about at all apart from the odd thing here and there. I hope, now I'm settled into my new job a bit more that I will be able to find things to write about and update more regularly.

That's it really...bit of a cheat I know!

See you soon...

Education Blog Awards

I received a Tweet this morning from@chrisrat asking me whether I know this blog had been nominated for Blog of the Year in the Education Blog Awards.

I have to admit that it hadn't even occurred to me to even look on the site as I never thought I would be nominated.

I'm amazed and very flattered that anyone would nominate me, so thank you whoever you are :)

Thank you also to everyone who stops by and reads. I'm always surprised that people find my ramblings interesting...and sometimes wonder whether I should even write half the things I do!!

Finally, of course, I would like to ask that, if you find this blog interesting and enjoy reading please take a second and vote for it... :)

Spicing up your Y7 Scheme of Work

Well hello there! Long time no see ....!!!

I have had a manic half term and may have time to blog about it over the half term break.

Until then I hope this will interest some.

Today I am doing a short presentation about Spicing up Y7 Schemes of Work. There are lots of hyperlinks to other things so will try to upload them all either to here or will find somewhere else to share them.

All of the documents referred to, together with many other resources are now available here on my new Wiki!

Hope you find this useful...

Spicing up your y7 sow

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

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.

eTwinning workshop at Stockton CLC

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Today, I was privileged to be invited to our local CLC to speak to Stockton's GTP (Graduate Trainee Programme) trainee teachers about our school's eTwinning experiences.  It was nice to work with Jenny Compton of the British Council and Val Brooks, Deputy of the Stockton CLC and fellow eTwinning Ambassador as well as to meet some of the new talent coming through from our local LEA Graduate Trainee Programme.

I promised that I'd upload my presentation onto this blog for the participants to look at in more detail at their own leisure and thought it would also be good to put down some of the areas that I ellaborated more on, as I spoke.

I covered how I got involved in eTwinning initially, as a part-time teacher to give me some focus and how now it has become an integral part of my teaching life.  I think it's important to stress, particularly for Secondary teachers who don't seem as widely involved in eTwinning across the UK as they are in the rest of Europe, that it is quite easy to mould your eTwinning projects into the curriculum without it being onerous and without it impacting negatively on exam results.  Infact, I firmly believe that eTwinning can enhance exam results as well as enhancing enjoyments of subjects.  It is also something that is ideal when thinking about ways of delivering the new KS3 curriculum and it can be cross-curricular and be something where pupils really can try out their creativity and love of the internet and all things computer-based.

I think that the presentation probably speaks for itself.  There are links to our highly successful prject from last year, Je blogue, tu blogues...let's blog! as well as various projects that our pupils did whilst involved in the project.  In addition there are links to one of our current projects that involved no MFL at all "How green is your world?" .

I think it's really important to remember that, whilst ideal for the MFL teacher as a way of stimulating real contact with native speakers of a similar age, eTwinning can be used in many creative ways using English as the means of communication (just about everyone wants to got their pupils practising English if at all possible).   One of our most successful international projects is one with a school in the Netherlands that covers Victorian England and the First World War through our History department and doesn't involve the use of Languages at all.   Also, a little idea I have in my head for cross-curricular links...to work with a department in school on a project from that curriculum area but work in French or German or Spanish (maybe with schools from across Europe, whose language learning is on the same level as our pupils).  That's just my sneaky way of getting pupils to use the language they learn without even knowing that their doing it!

Here is the presentation...

Ian Ramsey’s eTwinning Experience

View more presentations from Langwitch.

I have also add this presentation to my Langwitch Wiki  and you can find it here.

Training at Carmel

I was lucky enough to be invited to Carmel RC Technology College on Tuesday to speak to the MFL department about blogging and using Audcity. It was really nice to be asked by our PGCE student from last year who is have a very successful NQT year there now.

I always get very nervous before going to speak anywhere so it was really calming to be greeted by such a friendly team of teachers.

I spoke briefly about blogging and how it can be used with pupils to improve motivation, to show off their work, to communicate with them outside of school and even for that new "buzz" phrase of AfL. They all responded really positively and were keen to find out more.

We looked at several blogs that are used by MFL teachers with their classes such as:

Langwitch

Edgehill Spanish

Sans Problèmes

Moving on we then looked at some blogs written by Modern Linguists that give an insight into using technology in our teaching and generally give us motivation to be adventurous and creative with our classes. In particular we looked at:

this blog

Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom (of course)

My Languages

Box of Tricks

Vámanos

Languages and Learning

I also pointed out to them that there are several other excellent blogs out there that they can read and get great ideas from.

We discussed how to set up a blog, including blogging platforms, what the purpose of a blog could be and how simple and straight forward it can be to set up a blog and create the contect. I pointed out that if I can do it, then anyone can!

We also spent a little time looking at how to create posts and how to embed a You Tube video into your blog...all this in 1hr!

Next we moved to their computers and learnt how to use Audacity and create Vokis and talked about how Vokis could be used to do speaking assessments and, following José Picardo's

example how they could be used in AfL, with pupils assessing one anothers' work via the comments in a blog.

By the end of the session, it was obvious that there was the usual "information over load" but also that many members of the department were keen to go away and consider how they could used a blog with their pupils and also how they can move into creating soundfiles with pupils and makeing Voki with them.

It was definitely time well spent and I felt that the session was a great success.

Here is the slideshow that I used:

A Beginners’ Guide To Using Ict Creatively

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: cpd mfl)

Thinking outside the classroom box with Chris Fuller

My first workshop at the IOW Conference was "Thinking outside the classroom box" run by Chris Fuller. I must admit that I kind of gate-crashed this session, as I arrived much earlier than I expected having got on the Red Jet fast ferry rather than the slower car ferry. I got talking to someone who was going to his session and decided to tag along, not expecting to learn much new, as I blog myself. However, I went along to meet the man who left an amusing comment on here once and was certainly proved wrong about not expecting to learn anything new!
Chris runs the Edgehill College Spanish Blog and it's fab. He gave some great examples of how he has used the blog with pupils. I have already used my other blog with my pupils but nowhere near on the scale that Chris uses his. In particular, I loved the idea of getting the kids to write descriptions of themselves (without adding names), paste them into the blog and get the class to guess who was being described, adding their guesses via the comments...watch out for that idea being used when I get onto that topic with my Year 7s later this term! He also spoke about how he promoted the blog around school and made me think about how I could market mine a bit better around my school. I know that some pupils do visit and comment frequently but I'd like more to visit and get as many pupils as possible visiting and being enriched (can you say that?). So, although I sometimes struggle to talk myself up, I will be launching a huge advertising campaign around the school after half-term.
Chris also spoke about Podcasting and Moblogging using Gabcast and ShowZu both of which I'm hoping to try out with my pupils in the near future.
Next, he spoke about using mobile phones in language learning. I am really keen to get my pupils using their mobiles but have put of having the discussion with my Headteacher as I knew what the answer would be! It didn't help that a colleague, who saw Chris speak earlier in the year (I believe) went straight in to talk about pupils using them as soon as he got back to school and was (naturally) turned down. However, I'm considering the financial angle and thinking of going for the "look how much money we could save as a school if pupils used their phones instead of video recorders, voice recorders etc...". Money often talks louder than anthing else.
So, my first session of the conference was fascinating and I can thoroughly recommend going to hear Chris speak if you get the opportunity. He's really easy to listen too and has great examples of how he's using the technology he's talking about with his pupils...something that's worth it's weight in gold, in my opinion. Thank you, Chris!!!

A very busy week

I think the the next few days will be full of blog posts from me, as I seem to have done so much in a very short space of time. I've done so much, met so many people and had such a great time that I really don't know where to begin. I think maybe, I'll just go for it and apologise in advance for poor spelling and typing (no surprises there, then) and some rather mixed up time-lines. In no particular order I'm intending to blog about:

• my all new Ning that I set up last Wednesday and changed the name of yesterday
• the Isle of Wight Conference (of course)...hopefully individual posts about various aspects and how much I learnt etc..
• a chance encounter with a trainee life coach (aahhh...bet no-one expected that one - least of all me!)
• going to train MFL PGCE students at Durham University last week and the hazards that brought with it.

So, I'm now going to go and get busy...I even have emails to answer, somewhere!

Why blogging with pupils is so great!

I just had to write this post!
I just got a comment on the blog I created for our Dutch eTwinning Project from one of the English pupils involved. He wanted to know if we're travelling by ferry or plane and thought plane would be better even if a bit more expensive!
Priceless - I don't think he would have said that to me face to face, and so nice to get an opinion. (Unfortunately flying is A LOT more expensive!!! - and far too traumatic for Mrs. Butterfield who wouldn't have anyone's hand to hold!)