Happy 5th Birthday eTwinning

This week marks the 5th Anniversary of eTwinning.

For those of you who haven’t heard of eTwinning, it is the European Commission’s partner-finding and online collaboration tool. Schools and colleges (working with pupils and students between the ages of 3 and 20) can register their details, create a profile, search for partners and engage in online partnerships – all free of charge. Teachers and their students can form short or long term partnerships and collaborate on a whole range of curriculum based projects in any subject area using a variety of exciting and innovative ICT tools.

Photograph courtesy of Tony Barraclough Photography

I became involved with eTwinning 3 years ago when looking for a French partner school. I was inundated with schools wanting to set up projects with my school and we set up many successful projects. Since then I haven’t really looked back and run 1 or 2 projects every year, not just in MFL but also through PSHE with my lovely tutor group. In additions, it was our eTwinning work that really created the backbone of our International School Award last year.

Today is when schools are celebrating the 5th Year of eTwinning and to mark the occasion, thousands of schools around Europe had some kind of European

Photograph courtesy of Tony Barracough Photography

Celebration. Many school planted blue and yellow flowers but, always wanting to be different, we decided to have a “balloon release” with a birthday cake! After all of the environmental safety checks had taken place to make sure our balloons were eco-friendly we were good to go on Friday at midday. We released our balloons (blue and yellow of course), with a tag on them asking people who found them to email us to let us know where they found them. It was very effective and the balloons looked very happy bobbing away in the wind. I’m sure the hail storm 10 mins later helped them on their way no end!

Oh and the cake…it was delicious.

You can find our what other school have been doing to celebrate here.

Happy 5th Birthday, eTwinning!

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TeachMeetNE10

I was really pleased to read a tweet from Chris Harte that there is to be another TeachMeet in Newcastle on Thursday 29th April. This will be the third Northeastern TeachMeet and I’m really looking forward to being inspired again by some fantastic teachers from the local area and to meeting up with like minded teachers and old and new friends.

There is a change of venue for this TeachMeet – The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers – it’s near Central Station so should be pretty easy for people to get to.

If you’ve never been to a TeachMeet before, this is an ideal opportunity to come along and find out what all the fuss is about. For more information and to sign up here: TeachMeetNE10

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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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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.

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Twitter Mosaic

I’ve been looking for something to blog about for weeks and now thanks to @s_downe via @adamsutcliffe here we are. My Twitter mosaic. I think it’s great. Apparently you can get them done into a mug – I already have a “general” Twitter mug for work but am thinking a more personal one would really make sure nobody “borrowed” it!!!

Get your twitter mosaic here.

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Eurovision – IRS Style

Yesterday I had the dubious priviledge of being involved in the organisation of my first ever whole year group event.

I chose Year 8 as the unwilling victims of this activity and we labelled it “EUROVISION”. Now if truth be told it didn’t really end up anything like the real Eurovision, it was more of a day that involved Year 8 finding out “stuff” about Europe and the EU. They did Internet Research, Geography, Art, Music and Languages in a kind of carousel. As far as I can tell, initial responses from Year 8 were very favourable.

In Art, they set to work designing new flags for EU Nations and even for the EU itself (well the stars are a bit boring…) and I’ve seen some wonderful designs that really the capture the nature of Europe, bringing in flavours of many member countries.

Music involved comparing various European National Anthems and, in particular listening to two very different versions of Ode an die Freiheit, the traditional version and this one:

They were then charged with the task of creating their own EU Anthems on the keyboards. All of which was really enjoyed by many Year 8s.

Geography saw them learning the names of key European countries and doing some Independent Learning in groups, researching physical and economic geography of chosen countries. Pupils found it fascinating to learn that the UK is so small in comparison to many other countries. I think some were quite surprised at just how big some countries are.

For Languages they had two possible activities, one involving learning about the origins of European Languages, which went down really well with the pupils and the other involving Spanish and designers. Both activities were really well received by the Year 8s.

The ICT Research project was rather chaotic, being the first activity of the day and involving lots of shared computers. Oh, and of course the old “blocked” problems (which was curious, as I’d checked them on Friday!).

I made a little plenary activity at the end. The pupils had to watch the video below and list which countries they recognised as being represented. There are 14…go on, see how many you get!

www: pupils seemed to like it and most staff seemed positive by the end of the day.

ebi: better organisation of the first ICT activity and don’t put them all in to do that at once, don’t get so stressed, check websites again and again and again.

Will it happen again? I hope so! (I believe so, with the introduction of project weeks next year!)

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Das Hokey Kokey

I have a tendancy to watch too many comedy shows on Dave or GOLD or even on the BBC.  Most of the programmes are (kindly) chosen for me by my husband (if I’m REALLY lucky, he even lets me watch the cricket – and not just England losing either…Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and he, in return, allows me to watch the occasional CSI episode.

Yesterday, as a Mothers’ Day treat he picked out a Bill Bailey live show that he’d so thoughfully Sky+ ed for a special occasion (yes, we “live the dream” in our house) and I discovered a treasure!

Now I’m sure that many people have seen this before but I’m a bit slow on the uptake with these things and found it hilarious. It’s Bill Bailey doing Kraftwerk doing the Hokey Kokey all in German, of course.  I think is ideal for parts of the body (if not a bit basic really) but it’s good to be daft from time to time and have a bit of a laugh.  Logo 2 Unit 3 “Topfit” is where it could fit in for me, how about you?

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eTwinning workshop at Stockton CLC

eTwinning

Today, I was privileged to be invited to our local CLC to speak to Stockton’s GTP (Graduate Trainee Programme) trainee teachers about our school’s eTwinning experiences.  It was nice to work with Jenny Compton of the British Council and Val Brooks, Deputy of the Stockton CLC and fellow eTwinning Ambassador as well as to meet some of the new talent coming through from our local LEA Graduate Trainee Programme.

I promised that I’d upload my presentation onto this blog for the participants to look at in more detail at their own leisure and thought it would also be good to put down some of the areas that I ellaborated more on, as I spoke.

I covered how I got involved in eTwinning initially, as a part-time teacher to give me some focus and how now it has become an integral part of my teaching life.  I think it’s important to stress, particularly for Secondary teachers who don’t seem as widely involved in eTwinning across the UK as they are in the rest of Europe, that it is quite easy to mould your eTwinning projects into the curriculum without it being onerous and without it impacting negatively on exam results.  Infact, I firmly believe that eTwinning can enhance exam results as well as enhancing enjoyments of subjects.  It is also something that is ideal when thinking about ways of delivering the new KS3 curriculum and it can be cross-curricular and be something where pupils really can try out their creativity and love of the internet and all things computer-based.

I think that the presentation probably speaks for itself.  There are links to our highly successful prject from last year, Je blogue, tu blogues…let’s blog! as well as various projects that our pupils did whilst involved in the project.  In addition there are links to one of our current projects that involved no MFL at all “How green is your world?” .

I think it’s really important to remember that, whilst ideal for the MFL teacher as a way of stimulating real contact with native speakers of a similar age, eTwinning can be used in many creative ways using English as the means of communication (just about everyone wants to got their pupils practising English if at all possible).   One of our most successful international projects is one with a school in the Netherlands that covers Victorian England and the First World War through our History department and doesn’t involve the use of Languages at all.   Also, a little idea I have in my head for cross-curricular links…to work with a department in school on a project from that curriculum area but work in French or German or Spanish (maybe with schools from across Europe, whose language learning is on the same level as our pupils).  That’s just my sneaky way of getting pupils to use the language they learn without even knowing that their doing it!

Here is the presentation…

I have also add this presentation to my Langwitch Wiki  and you can find it here.

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More Wordle

Have just read a post from Jess McCulloch about Wordle, I felt compelled to go back there again this evening!
I don’t know if I missed this feature before but I discovered that you can put any URL for it to make into a beautiful cloud. Unable to resist, I put in this website’s URL and it seems that this is what The Langwitch Chronicles is all about…
…no mention of bizarre, odd, mental or crazy

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