A proper blog post will follow tomorrow, but here are the photos from today!
¡Vámonos!
"The decision to learn a language is an act of friendship. It is an outstretched hand." John le Carré
All a bit topsy turvy I guess, reporting on a course I ran on Tuesday after a presentation I did today but heigh ho!
Tuesday saw me heading across the city – or actually around it on the M6 lead by my motorway crazy SatNav- to Hillcrest School where I was delivering a day of training for Primary Language teachers on ICT in the Primary Language Classroom.
It was a really good day from my point of view with lovely food – bacon sandwiches for coffee break! – a great venue and marvellous enthusiastic delegates. And the added bonus of a visit to the Lingua centre at lunchtime.
To save on paper and also because I think online notes are more useful – click the link rather than type it in makes more sense to me – I made a wiki for the day on which all the notes, presentations and some of the outcomes are posted. I think that’s the way to go – what do you think?
I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at the Education Show today. I volunteered myself, admittedly, but I hardly thought they’d say yes! I’d attended a previous seminar there and had been rather unimpressed and thought ‘I could do better!’ – so I put my money where my mouth is – and hope I succeeded.
Below is my presentation which will shortly become a Slidecast once I’ve managed to find the time to download and edit the audio.
Comments and queries welcome :o)
Top tips for absorbing language learning
View more presentations from Lisa Stevens.
PS Thanks to @StephenDoBe for the simultaneous tweeting, and to my all the Twittermates who tweeted multilingual greetings to my audience!
I did a day of ICT in PLL training today at Hillcrest School and Sixth Form Centre. More of that in another post..
However, at lunchtime, we were able to visit Lingua, the language centre at Hillcrest. Similar to the Europa Centre, Lingua offers schools the opportunity to visit their shopping street which transports itself between France, Germany and Spain on a regular basis. groups can visit for a half day or whole day, taking part in activities for half the time and then venturing into the street to buy items – virtually, or in the case of souvenirs, actually!
Below are pictures I took today of the street – it’s currently in Germany!
Have a look at the Lingua website for more details!
Just received an exciting email from Kathy Wickstead, National Subject Lead for Languages.
She writes –
ALL (Association of Language Learners) is co-hosting a FREE workshop at the International Learning and Research Centre, South Gloucestershire, which will bring together teachers in key stages 2 and 3 to look at two inspirational approaches to language learning, Story Making and using Higher Order Thinking Skills. The workshop will show how these approaches engage pupils and can help to develop a smooth transition between key stages. Using actions and a ‘story map’, the story-making initiative takes pupils step by step from listening to participation, to story-telling and creating their own stories. It raises confidence in speaking and enables pupils to internalise key language patterns.Date: Wednesday 17th MarchTime: 9.30 – 12.30 (refreshments from 9.00)Venue: The International Learning and Research Centre, South GloucestershireThe Centre is located on the outskirts of Bristol, a taxi-ride from Bristol Temple Meads or Bristol Parkway stations.See http://www.all- nsc.org.uk/ nsc/?q=node/ 116 for further information.
A great opportunity – sadly I have a meeting and should be teaching anyway so I’ll be unable to go. But if anyone does go, please be sure to share!!
Last Wednesday I took part in a day for Language Coaches in Birmingham. The afternoon session was given over to looking at links between Primary Language Learning, EAL and literacy, and we were fortunate to have Joe Brown from CILT to address us.
I did try to blog as I went along but kept getting distracted from writing by getting involved in the talk so, when I looked back at the pictures I’d taken, I decided to reflect back by making a slideshow in Keynote.
At the end, it seems a minute of audio has disappeared – probably because I hit a button prematurely! – in which I was saying that Joe told us about a number of research projects going on, looking at PLL and literacy.
- storytelling
- the language of Maths
- APP writing
- motivation
- talk for writing
- Training the Trainers Module 9
All sounds very exciting and I await the results with anticipation. You can catch Joe speaking at PLS in Liverpool in two weeks time!
(This post has taken over 24 hours to be published. Note to self –
Blogger doesn’t like my videos, Youtube don’t like 17 minute clips, Slideshare is very temperamental and thank heavens for Garageband!)
I subscribed to the channel belonging to Imagiers a while ago.
Originally, I saw the traditional songs below –
Today I saw that there was new series – Les comptines de Gros nez. This is a series of 63 French rhymes / songs ‘sung’ by a cartoon blue man with a big red nose. For example –
Alternatively, you could use Les comptines de la souris –
Also on Imagiers are many vocabulary videos like the one below –
There are thousands of videos on the channel – some are more advanced grammar and so on, others are simpler vocabulary presentations. And some are not French at all – eg there are several clips about Helsinki!
Yesterday 
I took a Web Behaviour Test as part of BBC’s The Virtual Revolution – investigating how 20 years of the web has changed our lives.
I was asked questions about my Internet useage, how much time I spent online and doing what, how much ‘multi tasking’ I did and my response to a number of statements.
Would I be a bear, an elephant, an octopus, a hedgehog, a fox, an elk, a leopard or an ostrich?
My result is below – not a bad appraisal. Why not take the test and see which animal you are!
If you like to know what this quiz is hoping to achieve, check out what the scientists say.
Not one for Primary language learners perhaps, but nonetheless a find, I think!
Via my Googlereader I read a post on Lifehacker about Lyric Training and thought – ‘what fun!’
As Lifehacker says
Lyrics Training is a really fun approach to helping you pick up a foreign language. Choose a YouTube-hosted music video and select one of three mastery levels; Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert. As the video begins to play, the song’s lyrics appear underneath with several words missing. Your job is to fill in the missing words as they’re sung.
If you get stumped, the video stops playing until you can come up with the word, but don’t take too long because the app keeps track of the time it takes you to fill in the blanks. Click the “Give Up!” button to see the words that elude you.
Videos are available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Dutch, and are rated easy medium and hard. You can then choose easy medium or hard tasks. Having said that, I chose easy and an easy task – and it was qu
ite tricky as you have to type as you hear. I think if I listened to the song first I might have had a better chance. There is help – you can rewind the last line with the back space and use the tab to skip words you really can’t get! At the end you’re given a score based on how many words you successfully filled in and the time it took you in comparison to the actual length of the song. This is how I got on with Himno de la corazon
listening skills and also your spelling as it won’t accept the wrong spelling, letter by letter!
Have a go and see how you do!
Technology in Modern Foreign Languages – A practitioner’s perspective
February 24, 2010
Technology in Modern Foreign Languages – A practitioner’s perspective is a post by José Picardo in which he announces the online publication of a series of blog posts that originally appeared on his blog Box of Tricks over December/January, written by a wide variety of language practitioners about their experiences of and advice for using technology in the MFL classroom.
If you didn’t read the original posts, they’re well worth a read (even the one I wrote!) – and now they’re downloadable in one go.
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