The Wall of Language

The Wall of Language is a website that has been created by Nick Mair and Nick Friend with support of the Association for Language Learning and CILT for you to email prospective MPs questions about Language Learning. The website states

“Our aim is to make all political parties include a statement about the importance of languages in their manifesto.”

It’s easy to take part, just go to the website and follow the instructions on the Home Page. There are plenty of letters that have already been written that you can use and there’s even a link for you to find out who your Parliamentary Candidates are.

This is a great opportunity to see what importance our prospective MPs place on Languages, with falling numbers at KS4 and so few University students opting to take a Language degree.

I’ve written to the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates for my constituency, however unfortunately I couldn’t contact the Independent and UKIP candidates as they appeared to have no contact details. If someone could help me with that I would be very grateful )

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• TeachMeetNE10
• (My) Top Ten Tools for Digital Creativity in MFL

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.

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• The Wall of Language
• There’s a world outside my classroom…blogs and wikis in MFL

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

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• The Wall of Language
• TeachMeetNE10
• (My) Top Ten Tools for Digital Creativity in MFL
• Enquiry based learning

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.

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• The Wall of Language
• TeachMeetNE10

Phonics, slidecasting and podcasting

Over the last year I feel like I’ve neglected the things that started on me on this journey that has revived my enthusiasm for teaching MFL – namely my school blog Langwitch and podcasting. However, over the last week I have begun to revive them, slowly but surely.
Through the wonders of Twitter I have come to know Suzie Bewell, SSAT Lead Practitioner for MFL from All Saints Language College in York. She has worked a lot with her pupils teaching phonics to improve pronunciation and has seem great improvements. With this in mind I trawled Amazon over the summer holidays and found a Jolly Phoniques manuel which was more or less identical to the kind of thing my 4 year old son was doing last year at Nursery (he’s very bright, you know-he’s now writing essays!)
Once I’d got over the initial shock of being back at work I decided to embark upon teaching my Jolly Phoniques. As I teach French and German (yes, I know and Spanish and ICT…) I felt it important to do justice to both languages, so I set to work on the German as well as the French. For my German, I took as my inspiration a resource that I found on Suzie’s Wiki Do Once and Share and adapted it for my needs and for my French I used the Manuel Jolly Phonique all the way. The pupils so far have received it well – particularly my Year 10 class, whose pronunciation, to be quite honest was dreadful! We do lots of chanting with actions and spend lots of time going over actions when we get to tricky words that need a reminder of how to pronounce them and it seems to be working well.
Next is where the blog revival comes in! (Just incase you were wondering!)
I got to thinking how I could help my pupils even more with their pronunciation and began to wonder about making a slidecast, using the PowerPoint I’d used in class, together with the classes chanting. Never having done a slidecast before, I was nervous. However, I went onto Slideshare and just followed the instructions. I uploaded the PowerPoint, uploaded the mp3 soundfile (which I mangaged to improve the quality of, after they were initially too quiet, using the Levelator, as recommended by Joe Dale) and syncronised it all, just as I was told. I think the results are great – and if I can do it, anyone can!
Next I decided that my pupils could also do with even more practice so I create (re-vamped) 2 podcasts – one for French (Radio Langwitch) and one for German (Langwitch Radio), to avoid confusion – so that they can download their chants and pretend to be cool listening to music when they’re really practicing their French and German! Of course everything is now on my school blog for my pupils to use and enjoy with the whole family.

Les Jolly Phoniques

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• The Wall of Language
• TeachMeetNE10

Using Wallwisher

On the MFL Forum this week I read about Wallwisher in a post by Jimmy P. Subsequently I decided to try it out as a “welcome back” activity with a couple of classes. It’s a work in progress but here is what we’ve got so far. Yr Y10 set 4 class and Y8 set 1 classes have contributed so far but I will be encouraging my Year 7 class, who’ve only just begun, to contribute in the coming week. I got some lovely sentences with parce que from some Year 8s, however our interweb was playing up a lot this week in school so not all got their’s added, which was a shame…these things are sent to try us!
I’m thinking it might be a nice idea for the EDL next week to see how many differents introductions in differing languages we can get.
Here it is, anyway. I’ve closed comments on it for the moment but they will be re-opened during my next lesson in the ICT suite.

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• The Wall of Language
• There’s a world outside my classroom…blogs and wikis in MFL

Blogaversary

Thinking back over the year today, I realised that this blog had just had it’s first blogaversary. I felt it warrented a mention. I have really enjoyed my year of blogging on this blog (although I don’t think my husband has). It’s really nice to write and have people comment on what I’ve written. I learnt a lot on my journey over the last year and hope to learn even more in the years to come.
Thank you to those of you who read, you’ve helped to make this blog what it is today )

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• Happy 5th Birthday eTwinning
• Race for Life

Thinking outside the classroom box with Chris Fuller

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• Happy 5th Birthday eTwinning
• Race for Life

Etwinning work

My Year 10 French GCSE class have been making powerpoint presentations about school for the eTwinning Blog Je blogue, tu blogues…let’s blog. I amalgamated all of them into one very long powerpoint and then converted it into a slideshow by uploading it onto Slideshare and then embedding it into Let’s Blog. It’s important to note, however that the width for slideshows on Slideshare is 425 which is too wide for a standard blog, so I change the width to 375 in the code that I paste into the blog to make it look tidier )

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• Happy 5th Birthday eTwinning
• Race for Life

Meine Ferien video on Teacher Tube

Whilst I was out of work yesterday watching Alice, obviously I had to leave work for my classes.
I was in the computer room for one of the lessons with my bottom set Year 10 class so I left them a powerpoint about holidays with (facual) errors for them to correct – they wouldn’t be able to correct grammatical errors. Then I made a video about “my holidays”, using Photostory3 for Windows by adding photos I found in google images, putting one word captions on each image and then recording myself doing the narration giving more details. Photostory is really easy to use – you just have to follow the on screen instuctions ) A more detailed description can be found in the Teacher’s Corner of my Langwitch Wiki
After making the video, I then uploaded it into my TeacherTube account and embeded it into my blog by copying and pasting the code provided by Teacher Tube. Pupils then had to answer 6 questions about the video by sending their anwers via the comments at the bottom of the post.

Share on Facebook

Possibly Related Posts:

• The end of an era
• Busy Weekend
• Encouraging Independent Learners
• Happy 5th Birthday eTwinning
• Race for Life