Routes into languages Student Ambassadors Training

Once again, I was asked to speaking at the Routes into Languages Ambassador Training at UCL yesterday. Routes into Languages is a fantastic project that aims to raise languages awareness in schools and promote the continued study of languages at all levels.  Each year students of languages at a variety of universities around the country work as ambassadors, going into schools and running workshops for schools in their region.  This event is to give those ambassadors the training they need in order to be succesful.

The day is split into two sections, the first where all of the students are talked to about their role and where people who are involved in careers that use languages talk about their experiences and how they got into their relevant fields, then an afternoon of workshops to equip students to go out and really motivate pupils into wanting to continue with their languages study.

I took part in the first section of the day, by talking about how I became a teacher of languages and what was involved in training to become a teacher and what life is like as a teacher. I left the talk wanting to become an interpreter or translator as Gloria Vessey and John Evans filled my head full of their fascinating experiences of working with languages but I hope that some of the students left having a better idea of what life as a teacher is all about. It's always easy to promote teaching, as it's such a rewarding job with no day ever the same. I love it and, as I said to the students yesterday, I wouldn't want to do anything else really (despite what I wrote earlier!)

In the afternoon workshops, I ran a session on IT tools that the Student Ambassadors might like to use with pupils for whom they run workshops.  All materials can be found on the wiki that I created here. It was really interesting to find out which tools the students thought would be useful for them and also see their suggestions of how they could use them for themselves.  They all contributed to the Lino that is linked to here.

If you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend that you get involved with your local Routes into Languages Ambassadors.  I know I'm going to be speaking to my SLT about getting some to come into school to promote uptake of Languages as KS4 around options time, as although our uptake is fairly healthy, you can never have too many linguists...

ps... Also you may get lucky and get some fabby post it notes like the ones at the start of this post...

pps...I also got some tasty Christmas cake muffins and an iPad cover from the lovely Heather McGuinness, who I hope has recovered from her rodent-related incident!

Co-operative Learning: Showdown

It's no secret that I am a huge fan of co-operative learning structures and one of my favourites is Quiz Quiz Trade, which I blogged about here and use it regularly for vocabulary building, review and drilling, but I have also been trialling other structures this year and one I hit upon recently has gone down a storm since trying it.
Showdown is a team activity which has pupils working together, learning from and teaching one another. This is how it works:
Each team member has a mini whiteboard and pen, one of the team is the "Showdown Captain" who is identified by a little name label(fear not this role changes on each round!).
The captain chooses a question from a set of cards. I chose the vey uninspiring "translate a sentence into French".
Once chosen, all team members write their own answers on their MWB, without showing their team.
When all are done, the captain says "showdown", then all show their answers and they must discuss them to reach a consensus.
When they are happy they all agree, the Showdown Captain, leads the team in a "unique" team celebration.
Captain hands the role over to the next person to their left and all is repeated.

I let them refer to books but it depends on how you want to use it, the class, etc...
Also, as I'm trying to cut down on paper used, rather then drawing "card" I put 12 phrases on the board and give dice, the captain rolled the dice instead of drawing the card. It still worked as well as drawing a card.

UK eTwinning Conference 2013

As an eTwinning Ambassador, I was delighted to be able to attend this year's eTwinning Conference at the NCTL in Nottingham at the weekend, after having missed last year due to work commitments. As ever, the whole event filled me with enthusiasm and inspired me to get going with more eTwinning projects in the coming academic year.

I think, it's fair to say that, in a time when the teaching profession is criticised daily in the media for being "enemies of promise" and failing pupils no matter what it does, it's not easy to remain positive about a job that I love.  This is why an event such as the UK eTwinning Conference is so fantastic, as you never meet a negative eTwinner. They are always so full of energy and new ideas that you cannot fail to be uplifted.  This was certainly true of this weekend.  Not only were the workshops (which I'll come to later) inspirational but also the opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet new ones to share ideas and experience is invaluable.

The British Council and eTwinning always manage to put together a programme for these events that gives opportunity for collective reflection and also for personal (professional) growth and this weekend was no different.  The conference was started with a Key Note speech from Aileen Monaghan, and HMI for Education Scotland. She spoke about "Transformative change in learning and links with international education". It was truly awesome to hear an HMI praise teachers and talk about how our work is crucial in moving pupils forward. She also highlighted a project from a workshop that I attended, showcasing how eTwinning had worked together with HMIs to move a school from a very difficult place where staff were unhappy and children weren't getting the most out of their education to transforming the learning and the school.  I have to say that I ended up wishing that I worked in Scotland, where people seem very sensible indeed!
 
My first workshop was run by David Mitchell and was on the theme of Quadblogging. This is something that I have been interested in for a while and have often thought about getting involved. David spoke about how blogging had increased pupil achievement with his Year 6 class over the course of a year and also about how he came up with the idea of Quadblogging.  The idea is fantastic. 4 classes with 4 different blogs who visit and comment on those blogs in a cycle each month.  That is way too simplistic a description of it and would suggest that if you don't yet know about Quadblogging, you can read about it at Quadblogging.net. I have signed up and hope to get my new Tutor Group Quadblogging in September.

Saturday afternoon saw me going to Bob Harrison's workshop on Education's Digital Future.  It was mind blowing to think about where technology can take our pupils and how little (some) schools have prepared for this.  I was particularly interested in a quiz that Bob did with us about new technologies and to find out where pupils often sit with this in comparison to their teachers.  We need to make sure that we keep up with them otherwise schools will be left behind.

The eTwinning Awards, as ever were full of inspirational teachers being rewarded for their outstanding projects, giving me lots of food for thought in terms of projects for next year.

Sunday saw us in more workshops. In the one I went to run by John Warwick and Lesley Atkins I found more about the school and project that I mentioned earlier.  It was really fascinating to see how international education can transform a school and the learning within that school.  What a shame more people can't see the possibilities. It is essential that for international education within schools to be successful, it needs to be embedded in the curriculum otherwise when staff change, it dies.  eTwinning is so easy to do and to embed into the curriculum!

As the conference drew to a close, we were reminded of how important it is to make sure that our pupils are digitally educated by Connor Galvin of University College, Dublin and discussed the topic of who is responsible for our children's digital safety. There is no easy answer to this but we did decided (on our table) that digital safety was essential and should be a partnership between school and parents - however all too often parents don't know what "digital safety" means.

The conference closed and we all bid our sad farewells to one another, happy in the knowledge that we had not given up our weekends for nothing and fully enthused for the end of term!

Watch out for new eTwinning projects from me coming your way in 2013-14...including something involving Scratch (I hope)

You can find out more about eTwinning at http://etwinning.net and at eTwinning UK's blog.

Welcome back!

 
I've returned to Blogger after many years at helenabutterfield.net 
I thought it would be nice to be able to find my by my online name and thought I 'd return to to my roots at the same time.
So, here I am at www.langwitch.co.uk
I knew I'd get here one day :)

Motivation and Engagement through International Links #ililc3

My other presentation was on my favourite topic of International Links.  There was a strong focus on the benefits of eTwinning as I'm such a fan and an eTwinning Ambassador (also that is where I have most of my experience in working with schools across Europe). virtually.

Here is the presentation, also if you search for the eTwinning tag on this blog, you will find out lots more about eTwinning and how it can benefit your pupils and you as a teacher.  Enjoy...

International collaboration from Helena Butterfield

Using Google Apps for Education #ililc3

At the weekend I was extremely lucky to have been a speaker at the ICT and Languages conference 2013.  Having attended as a delegate last year, I bit the bullet and submitted proposals to present 2 sessions this year and was over the moon when my submissions were accepted.

Session 1 was my first talk of the day about GoogleApps for Education.We have this in our school and it's used extensively between staff for sharing information, good practice and general communication, and also it can be used with pupils.

Over the last year I have tried a variety of activities using Google Docs to help my pupils communicate and collaborate more easily and thought that others deserved to know how totally amazing it is.  We have a Google Edu account so we have greater security settings and we can share from outside of or to that account from elsewhere.  If you have a similar set up, you may not be able to see the presentations made by the delegates if you are logged into your school Google Apps account at the moment.

My presentation (made in Google Docs) is below, together with a link the wikipage where delegates could access presentation documents to collaborate on.  Please look at them - I found the innovative ways that their schools were using ICT fantastic and also gained lots of ideas from them...including mobile learning envy!!

Additional notes are below the presentation...

Firstly, here is the link to original google doc presentation

Now here is a copy of the presentation, as I had problems embedding the original presentation for some reason...

Google apps for pupil collaboration from Helena Butterfield

For the pupils, one of the best things about using Google Docs is that they don't have to keep saving their work. Once it's created a document is automatically saved every few minutes, no "Miss, I forgot to save my work" at the end of the lesson!

Diagnostic marking is also very easy via Google Doc as you can give general feedback through the "comments" at the top right of a document AND highlight individual words so that pupils can see where corrections can be made.  Furthermore through the threaded comments a dialogue can be established between teacher and pupil, as a document is edited.

However, for me the most powerful thing about Google Docs is that you can have groups of pupils working on the same document at the same time and it updates in realtime.  Therefore pupils on opposite sides of the classroom can collaborate...in fact pupils on different sides of the world can collaborate at the same time, without having to attach, download, upload (and forget to do all of that as well!!!)

My top tip; if pupils are creating a resource themselves, get them to create, give it atitle then share immediately to me (otherwise they forget to share!!)

We didn't get onto Google Forms as I had hope but suffice to say that they are brilliant for pupil voice and extremely versatile and easy to use!

Here is a link to the Wiki where the presentations can be found and I think you'll agree that the delegates did a wonderful job of collaborating - in fact I think that two of the groups didn't even physically speak about their presentation at all, it was all done via the comments (you'll have to sneak a look at the comments as well!)

Oh I almost forgot...I'd also set up a Google Spreadsheet for the delegates to suggest uses for Google Apps in their (or anyone else's classrooms) but we also didn't get round to the plenary (I hope Mr Wilshaw or anyone else from Ofsted doesn't see this!!!). There's a link on the wiki and now here as well. Please feel free to share your ideas.  Again, if you are a school Google Docs user, you may have to log out of that account in order to view or contribute.

What will 2013 bring for Langwitch?

I was going to do a reflective post on 2012 but figured with family deaths, pet deaths and an Ofsted that is best left forgotten, it would be better to look forward rather than back.

Professionally, 2013 is looking quite exciting already. Most importantly I am going to be speaking a ililc3 in February. This is a fantastic opportunity that I am really looking forward to.  If you are a linguist and have never been but are looking for excellent CPD which doesn't cost a fortune, I can't recommend it enough.  You can book by following the link here.  Looking at the people who are speaking and themes for the weekend it should be fantastic. I'm talking about using Google Apps for Education and International Links. So I better get on and use them / do some before February!

Secondly, we have our first ever French exchange taking place in March.  I am really looking forward to that happening, as it can only help move our pupils forward in their language learning.

I will also be very sad to see my tutor group leave this year, as they are in Y11...but at least it means we have the Prom to look forward to :)

On a personal level, cycling is going to be my thing this year, something which I'm really looking forward to, I am also aiming to give the 365 photos a go again. Let's hope it lasts for longer than last year's!

Happy New Year, I hope that 2013 is a successful year for you all.