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!

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)