The Langwitch Chronicles

Déjeuner du matin

Yesterday we had a borough-wide CPD Day. I was lucky enough to be able to choose what I wanted to do, rather than have a day of workshops thrust upon me, so I chose to go to our local CLC for a day of creativity on Apples.

We were given the task of making a film, using iMovie and we had to include a flashback. So, we got into groups of 4 – we were 3 linguists and an ICT teacher (unfortunately for the ICT teacher!). We quickly decided to go all French and arty, planning to use Déjeuner du matin by Jacques Prévert. The final result can be seen below and we were all very pleased with the outcome. We would have liked to have added some piano music in the background for that true arty feel but, unfortunately we ran out of time!

I’m now buzzing with ideas as to how I can use what I learnt with my pupils – just need the time to be able to do it…

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The French Exchange Finally Happened

Took this at the NRM and thought it was funny!

Many moons ago (so it seems)…well, 3 years, just when I was starting on this adventure into new technologies and discovering the possibilities for MFL teachers, such as myself, in terms of getting pupils using language for real, I was asked by my then Head of Area to find a French school in order to establish a link for exchanges. We already had an extremely successful link with Meppen in Germany and an equally successful link with Cheste in Spain but French was most certainly the poor relation in terms of links and opportunities for exchanges.

I had just discovered eTwinning via Joe Dale’s marvellous blog and decided to find out what all of the fuss was about. Having registered with eTwinning, I quickly found a partner and established a project with a view to setting up an exchange the following year. The project “Je blogue, tu blogues…let’s blog!” was very successful with pupils from both schools develping frienships and helping one another with their language learning. However unfortunately for many reasons the link didn’t develop into an exchange and the hunt was on again.

One of my colleagues in the MFL Department had a link with a teacher in Caussade near Toulouse. I contacted her and things looked positive. We worked together on an eTwinning project (in English only, this time, as there were several schools involved) and my class exchanged letters every half-term or so with a class from her school and set things in motion for an exchange.

There were hurdles to overcome, as with any new link. The biggest hurdle being that our partner school wanted to bring 27 pupils!!! This was unheard of in Ian Ramsey history of exchanges…we are normally over joyed if we get to 20 (as I think most schools would be). Nevertheless, we persevered and, with a plan to house some pupils in a local hotel got plans underway. I was over-joyed when I managed to persuade the final 2 pupils to host French people, meaning that no-one was to stay in a hotel!

The week itself arrived and we had an action-packed programme, hightlights included a visit to Durham, the Angel of the North and the Metro Centre, a whole group trip to York and the National Railway Museum, project work at Teesside CLC and a visit to meet the Mayor of Stockton. The funny thing was, I got stick all week for organising the visit to Mayor and in fact our French friends loved it – telling me to definintely keep in on the programme for the future! As part of their CLC project, pupils started to work on a wiki as a diary of their week, to which I will add their presentations and leaflets about the history of the railways and York tourist leaflets as soon as I can. You can see what has been done so far here (still needs a bit of work!).

What of the future? Well things look very rosy. In 3 weeks time our pupils will return to France. Again, a record of 21 pupils (some of whom were so enthused by the whole event that they asked if they could come eventhough they didn’t take part in the home-leg!). In addition we will carry this through to another eTwinning Project specifically aimed at improving Speaking and Writing Skills for GCSEs.

Sadly I’m unable to go on the return leg – I’ve been off gallavanting around Europe too often already this year, so am indebted to my colleagues, Fiona and Julie for taking the return trip and for their invaluable support during the exchange week itself.

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Enquiry based learning

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As part of the preparation for the LinkedUp Project that we’re working on, I was invited to take part in a training day at Bedlington High School in December.

In conjuction with Newcastle University, the school have been running a programme in KS3 to promote and develop independent learning and thinking skills, which will equipe their pupils with the tools that they need to do well not only in the classroom but also that they can transfer into their lives outside of school. As our 14-19 project is based around developing  independent learning and transferable skills this was a fantastic opportunity to see these kind of activities in action across the curriculum.

The project is based around Habits of Mind which are essential skills that pupils can transfer to use outside of the classroom, whilst also improving their languages skills. Many of the tools involved are Thinking Skills, with the “Tool Kit” including such activities as diamond ranking, odd one out, venn diagrams, 8 Qs and, my current favourite, inference squares. What I particulary liked was they way the plenaries centered around which “Habits of Mind” pupils used and how they used them.

We watched 3 lessons, Food Technology, Maths and PE all at different levels- an education in itself, as I don’t think I’ve observed many lessons outside of my own subject area in the last 15 years. It was amazing to see how independent these pupils were. They were, not only able to work on their own far better than my own pupils but also able to articulate themselves so well! The confidence they had when speaking to adults was very impressive! Not only could they talk about the “Habits of Mind”, but they could also express how they used them in lessons and outside of lessons, why they were important but also how they felt that they made a lot more progress using enquiry-based learning. One thing that did concern me was a comment from an MFL teacher about not being able to do it properly in Languages!

Feeling inspired and determinded to show you can use enquiry-based learning in MFL I returned to my school on a mission. As ever, I’ve started small, introducing the Habits of Mind to my classes. We’ve talked about the Habits of Mind and how they apply to Language Learning and in many lessons we have focussed on these through the lesson, with the plenary focussing on which Habits of Mind the pupils have used and, more importantly, HOW. It’s been interesting to see that just about all pupils recognise the need to be persistent learners (something I’ve been very pleased to see!) and now I’d like to see them recognise some of the other skills they use on a daily basis – not only in MFL lessons but in all lesson.

For me, I want to develop this are as follows:

• Encourage pupils to discuss in groups how they use Habits of Mind
• Integrate “Habits of Mind” into more of my lessons
• Look at how I can combine the Habits of Mind with Learning to Learn
• Use Chris Harte’s session on Debriefs, which he delivered at the lauch of our LinkedUp project , to help me taylor these strategies more towards MFL teaching – particularly in the Target Language aspect, to encourage more use of TL from my pupils.

I will keep you updated…

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LinkedUp

At the end of September I was approached by Zahida Hammond to work with her on an application for one of the new LinkedUp grants that are being funded around the UK, to promote language learning. The idea was to continue to build on work that local 14-19 MFL Networks had begun last year, creating resources and activities for KS4 and KS5 that use new technologies and  develop pupils independence.

After much hard work from Zahida, we learnt in November that the application had been successful and now it’s full steam ahead. We have 3 14-19 Networks working together on the project-Stockton, Middlesbrough and Whitley Bay with about 10 members across the network. We will all work on different aspects of the resources and they will all be shared together at the end. The idea is that we will use some technologies that will be new to some colleagues in the groups and also develop activities that encourage pupils to become independent language learners.

I’m very excited about this project and am looking forward to being able to use the resources created through the Networks and also to adapting the activities we create to being used in other topic areas and in other year groups too.

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Guest Author

Image: Gregory Szarkiewicz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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.

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A year of perfect vision

A year ago today I had laser eye surgery that gave me better than 20/20 vision. I opted for the LASIK-wavefront treatment and at the time I was really worried that I’d done the wrong thing, as the first few days were rather unpleasant-painful, sore eyes and less than perfect vision (although my vision was good enough not to have to wear glasses, even then!). Over the following weeks, I wore my plasic eye guards to sleep in and followed all the instructions and within hardly any time at all I had forgotten that I ever wore glasses.

A year on I can categorically say that it is one of the best things I’ve ever done. My vision is perfect and I don’t have to contend with uncomfortable glasses and swapping them for sunglasses at inconvenient times. I love being able to see at the hairdressers, when I’m putting my makeup on and when I go swimming. I love not having to keep pushing my glasses back up my nose every couple of minutes and I love my glasses not steaming up whenever I open the oven door!!

The only down-side is, now I can’t get away from the bags under my eyes and the concealer gets ever thicker, as ends of terms approach. In addition, I had looked forward to buying myself some cool designer sunglasses in the summer…it was rather disappointing therefore this year to have bought 3 different pairs of sunglasses and still be unhappy with them. I rather think I must be too picky!

I still wake up on a morning and reach for my glasses though…

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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!

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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

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Go Animate and Peer Assessment

I had an impromptu lesson in our ICT suite a couple of weeks ago with my Year 7 class so decided to give Go Animate a go. I’d wanted to use if many times over the last few years but never quite had the opportunity – I think it may even have been blocked for a while – so was keen to get going.
I was very specific about what I expected at the end of the lesson, to avoid too much “playing” and not enough French.
At the end of the lesson they emailed their links to me – my school email addres, of course – and I was please to see what I received.
Once received, I put each one onto my Langwitch blog and then asked the class to go back to the blog and comment on one anothers’ work using the “what went well” and “even better if” format. Some of the comments were really lovely, such as:

“c‘est fantastique“

“that was great use of French, well done!“

“C’est fantashique! It was awesome, but the speach was very fast and you weren’t able to catch all of it. Bien! ”

“bien. I thought one thing you could of improved was to check the speech bubble cause one was english but I thought the rest was really good”.

I find it interesting that they were more critical than I would have been, but find that, generally pupils are more critical of one anothers’ work that I expect and often need to encourage them to find more positives!

I am now definitely a fan of Go Animate and have already used it again with my Year 8 class…they will appear shortly on the blog or wiki.

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Leo the Lion visits Ian Ramsey

Over the last few weeks, Ian Ramsey had a guest who came to visit from Germany. Leo, the Bavarian Lion, came to stay with us on his tour round the world.

Whilst he was staying at Ian Ramsey, Leo took part in many exciting activities. He took part in a science experiment. Next, he went off to the LRC to check some books out and pose for a photo with William Shakespeare. He then ran over to North Site (in the rain) had his photograph taken with the amazing sculpures that some Y9s created last year.

Back in South Site, Leo went to work on Reception in the Office, taking some phone calls. In addition to all of these activities at school, Leo came home with me at half term and went Halloweening. Naturally, Leo also observed the minute’s silence on Remembrance Day at 11.00am and even managed to get himself a poppy.

I think Leo had a great time at Ian Ramsey-he particularly enjoyed playing “Past Tense Pass the Parcel” with 8vD3 on Monday last week!

He now heads of to Brazil to experience life there. You can follow his further adventures on his blog by following this link: Leo’s Blog

You can see a selection of his photographs below.

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