Month: October 2008

Not the bumper crop we had hoped to post but we did manage to finish three despite crashing laptops, intermittent Internet connection and microphones that wouldn’t work!

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I’m just showing 6VH how to get around our little problem with Voki not recording directly by using Audacity. So brace yourself for lots of Voki coming at you this afternoon ;o)

Thanks to Zara in 5SD for letting me use her sound file to demonstrate!

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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve spent my lunchtimes getting rather hot and bothered rehearsing three dance routines in Spanish with a group of Key Stage 2 pupils at WCPS in preparation for an excting challenge.

Following on from the success of Take Ten en français,(see Jo Rhys-Jones’ blog post for more details) Devon Education Services is developing Take Ten en español, and we were asked to take part. I know – Sutton Coldfield is miles from Devon but it all happened after an ‘on the hoof’ chat with Chris Wakeley at Primary Languages Show last year when Jo Rhys-Jones volunteered my services!

Take Ten is ‘a fantastic little resource from Devon Education Services. It’s a handy pocket-sized book full of games and activities that can be used as PE warm-ups or more sedately in the classroom as Brain-gym exercises.’ The English translation is alongside the Spanish and it links languages and physical activities, neatly addressing two initiatives at once!

So, along with five Devon schools, at the start of term we received a DVD and CD with our three dances. When I asked in assembly for volunteers, half of Key Stage 2 wanted to join in – then they saw the dances and quite a few dropped out. Having said that, there were 36 stalwarts and it was SOOO hard to choose the final team of 10 – but choose I did and this morning, the big day arrived!

Tracy Adams and Simon the cameraman arrived from Devon and we set to work dancing our socks off, resplendent in our Take Ten T-shirts. I’m just glad that I was dancing behind the camera as I was getting rather tired by the end – and I am quite fit! The kids did so well that filming was completed in record time – even with chocolate biscuit and juice breaks! In fact, the kids were rather disappointed that they’d finished so we had a bit of a muck around – see our videos!

We can’t wait for the final product to be published so we can see what it looks like. but until then, we have our Take Ten en español T-shirt and photographs to remind us of the day!
As soon as it’s available, I’ll let you know as it’s a really good resource and well worth buying for your schools.

Only a few days left now until the Isle of Wight Conference this weekend.

I’ll be heading down on Friday for two days (Saturday and Sunday) of PD and social networking at its best – there are so many sessions on offer that we’re spoilt for choice – and I’ve got to fit in delivering one of them with the lovely Jo Rhys-Jones with whom I am also hosting a ‘Round Table’ – I hope this refers to a discussion not a piece of furniture ;o) I’m really looking forward to hearing some inspiring presenters like Mark Pentleton, Drew Buddie, Chris Fuller, Adam Sutcliffe – I could go on and on – and meet up with friends, old new and virtual!

To see what’s on offer – and it is a very impressive lineup – check out Integrating ICT in the MFL classroom, the blog of the mastermind behind the conference, Mr Joe Dale.

I acknowledge that it is a long way, but it is well worth the trip, and is a bargain at £100. And it’s not too late to book! Download the booking form from here – you know it makes sense :o)

I’ve just noticed that the visit counter on ¡Vámonos! has just reached five figures – how exciting!

At last count there have been 10,004 visits – and there have been more as the counter wasn’t in place from the start as I didn’t want to be discouraged by the lack of action! For someone who gives the impression of being very confident but actually isn’t, I am really excited that people have actually read my blog and that, in less than a year, it’s been ‘hit’ over 10,000 times.

I know it might have been 4 people 2,500 times each but my Mum is computer illiterate, my husband has all blogs blocked on his laptop by his employers, my Dad sadly didn’t have very long to access it and my kids are only interested in the posts that make noises, involve games or involve them, so unlikely!

When I reached the last milestone I blogged – 6000 hits on 22nd June – I set myself the goal of reaching five figures by Christmas so I’ve reached it just over two months early!

Little did I suspect when I started last October that I would be here nearly a year later having been read by so many!

Muchísimas gracias a todos xx

Photo – Marco on Flickr

Guest blogger – Adam 6VH
I enjoyed making Vokis so much that I decided to make one at home! This one is not Spanish but I managed to play around with the accents and this is the result!
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PS I know he’s hijacked my blog ;o) Sra. Stevens

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You may have noticed rather a lot of Voki action on ¡Vámonos! today as 6VH and I had an experiment with Voki.com. We’re coming to the end of unit on school and to round it off, we were making up paragraphs about school. As the SIP is highlighting AfL and because I think it’s a valuable way of monitoring, assessing and practising listening and speaking, we’re doing lots of audio recording. Yesterday, 3AT had a go at recording Spanish weather forecasts using Audacity. This morning 5SD were recording information about the solar system in Spanish – they all tried to do it at the same time having discovered that the laptops had in built microphones (cue various raps, football chants and random utterances before they got to work) but this proved to be unsatisfactory so we set up two recording areas outside the classroom and in the cloakroom.

This afternoon, 6VH were supposed to planning their scripts for the first part of the lesson. However, being inquisitive kids, they noticed that I was making sure that Voki worked at school (it does sometimes and not others so have to check there and then!) and before I knew it were on logged on and following what I was doing.

Sadly, the record facility in Voki wasn’t working today, so i had to record in Audacity, export as a .WAV and then use the upload function to make my (introductory) Voki. I uploaded it to my blog as I couldn’t log in either!

Lots of the kids, by the time I played mine back, were well into exploring Voki. They had a good nose around and worked out that they could use the text to speech, and discovered that there are various Spanish voices – male and female – that read your text surprisingly fluently. I was very pleased with their independence.

If only we had experienced more reliable internet connection, less PCs crashing and a less hit-and-miss reaction from the Voki site, then we would have had more than five Voki published on my blog. However, the excitement generated in the class as we published those that did make it was a ray of sunshine after a really bad day.

Next week, we’re going to make more and hopefully use Voicethread too to share our thoughts!

We’ve had fun and games with crashing computers so we’re hoping this will work :os

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And we’re on a roll here – here’s comes Lauren’s punk rocker!!

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