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

(My) Top Ten Tools for Digital Creativity in MFL

On the 23rd and 30th March Routes into Languages ran 2 International Festivals for Northeast schools at the Universities of Newcastle and Teesside. Alongside these 2 events, Links into Languages offered CPD for teachers who had accompanied pupils and asked me of I could run 2 sessions.

The first of these sessions was about online tools that we as MFL teachers can use to encourage creativity in our pupils and that we can use in our teaching to spice up our lessons. Below is the presentation I gave with my personal top 10 favourites. One day I'll get as prefessional as Joe Dale and Lisa Stevens and take lots of photographs as well, altough that would involve remembering to take the photos in the first place!

Please feel free to contribute with other tools that you like to use...

Top 10 Tools

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

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!

I think I'm addicted...

...to Wallwisher!
I thought for a long time about a project for the EDL on Friday that could included as many of our international partners as possible and, after having a go a Voicethread and no-one contibuting, I decided to go for something simpler. As I mentioned in my last post, I had a go with Wallwisher this week and I thought it was a great idea for a collaborative international project, so I set one up. It has already begun to have additions made so I'm hoping that by Friday all contributers will have a wonderful resource to share with their pupils and colleagues.

Voicethread!

I experimented with Voicethread today and was very impressed with the results. Unlike me, I decided to start small, so worked at lunctime today with my goregeous Yr8 G&Ts who come faithfully week in week out to do extra fun/ICT French things. We just focused on, firstly getting them registered and choosing their "image" and secondly on getting "somthing" recorded...about 3 sentences. However, I was VERY pleased with the results and can really see the potential for using this in several ways in MFL teaching.
In addition, the kids themselves thought it was great that they could instantly record their thoughts and are keen to set one up on out Je blogue, tu blogues...let's blog (will have to discuss with Sylvie).
The one downside, despite choosing the embed a small version on by blog, only half of the Voicethread can be seen and that means that not all speaker's icons can be seen. Does anyone know how to rectify this?
Don't know what it will look like on here, but here it is anyway...please go to my Langwitch blog and leave comments for the kids...you know how they ADORE that kind of thing :D

An experiment tomorrow

I've seen many people tweet and blog about Voicethread and thought it an absolutely fantastic idea for MFL teaching so have decided to jump in and experiment with my G&T group in Yr8 at lunchtime tomorrow.
It's dead boring, just a picture of a house with the idea that they will talk about where they think it is, who lives there, what's it like inside, but it's a start nevertheless. The possibilites are endless to encourage creative use of language and actually SPEAKING, not just typing. As ever, the ideas are flowing thick and fast, just hope that my body can keep up :o)
I'll post again tomorrow (hopfully) with the results of my experiment!

The rest of the day tomorrow will be spend moderating and finalising coursework marks to send them off ready for Friday...WJEC deadline.