I was very privileged to be invited to present this year at the Primary Languages Show in Liverpool, not once but twice!

I promised at my two sessions that I would post my notes and resources on my blog for people to download and use.

So here’s my first presentation. If you download it, the hyperlinks all work – or did when I tried them. However, if they don’t, remember that I have bookmarked all the sites to which I referred (and more) on Delicious tagged PLS09 – http://delicious.com/lisibo/pls09

The Powerpoints I used are also below –

I have blogged this unit previously here and you will find my worksheets, the SoW and more ideas here and a fuller description of how we animated our animals here.

A couple of things I mentioned but didn’t put in the presentation – the masks were downloaded from Sparklebox and the animation was done using FramebyFrame on my Macbook. You can also use SMAnimator (free to download on a PC) or ICanAnimate (for PC or Mac costs about £40)

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!

As I write, it’s Day 2 of the Primary Languages Show and I’m in a really interesting session by Louise Harty from Northumberland who is talking about Thinking skills in Fairytales and Fables – blog post to follow!

I was asked to speak at the conference this year – I did my first presentation yesterday (repeated) about El Carnaval de los animales and this afternoon I’m going to present You and Youtube (twice)

As promised, I’ll be blogging my sessions and uploading the resources to which I refer so if you were in Liverpool and want the resources, they’re there, and if you weren’t in Liverpool, you can benefit too! Any questions, feel free to ask.

I’ll also try to blog the sessions I attended – really interesting they are too! and I’m hoping to cadge some notes from others too!

This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting up with a number of educators – teachers and advisors – who shared an interest in eTwinning. I had been asked by the lovely Isabel Lalsingh of the British Council eTwinning team to present a short case study of my eTwinning experiences and this I was pleased to do.

Good to see Isabel again, to meet Andy Tromans having heard his name mentioned numerous times, and to see @spookingdorf aka Dale Jones – that was a surprise! And of course to meet eTwinning fans new and old!

Below is my presentation in its entirety – it isn’t on its side as I had feared ;o) If you need any help, feel free to contact me.

Mark Pentleton of Radio Lingua Network fame has one more worked his magic and a few days ago, launched a new addition to the plethora of products already available to help you learn languages.

Called School Run French, the series of 6-7 minute episodes allow you to take advantage of the school run, football run, Brownies / Badgers / BB run – in fact, any short journey to learn or practice your French. As Mark explains

Many of our listeners have been asking for materials which they can use
with their children or grandchildren, and we’ve been working for some time
on the development of materials aimed at this group. We’re delighted to
announce “School Run French” as the first in a series of shows which will
be aimed at younger language learners.

Picking up a language at an early age equips children with valuable skills
for life, and just as our many hundreds of thousands of adult listeners are
learning a language in their coffee break, so too can children learn a
language while they’re doing something else, for example in the car on the
way to school, football practice, ballet class, or whatever.

School Run French breaks down the French language into short chunks of 6-7
minutes, and every episode contains an interactive audio game which helps
children consolidate what they’ve learned.

School Run French is available on iTunes to download and sample audio
episodes will be put there on a weekly basis. However, the first ‘pack’ of five
lessons with colourful pdf puzzle sheets is now available for £5.00 (+VAT for EU customers).

I’ve had a listen and I love it – so do my ‘testers’ – marvellous having two kids who are a acaptive audience! They like the fact that it’s fun and there are games and challenges to test whether they know the answer.

Just itching for Mark to do School Run Spanish as I am constantly asked for such a resource by the parents, grandparents and carers of pupils at school. How about it, Mark? ¡Por favor!

During the session on eSafety in virtual spaces, we were shown a video clip from the European Union’s Safer Internet Day (February 10th) resources.

Really interesting and powerful.

You can check out all the resources here and read more about blocking online bullying.

What is safety? Here is the list we compiled in a workshop on the subject of eSafety in virtual spaces.

http://www.wordle.net/
Much of the material we considered n the early part of the session came from the following site -: http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/

Here’s the link to a videoclip linked to people not always being quite what they seem online – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp5nScG6C5g

We had a discussion based around the theme – where do you draw the line? Do we mind people taking our photos? Does it matter on the context? What about children? Is this different? Should it be the matter of course that we seek written permission for use of children’s images? Does this extend to their work or just their photos?

Then we were asked to come up with a scenario that could be used to provoke debate on eSafety.

Our scenario – a 10 year old child with a Facebook profile. The child has given herself a false DOB to register but then revealed the truth on her profile that she is 10 and single. The profile was open to people who weren’t friends as she was member of a network. What issues does this raise?

Another scenario – some pupils in a class don’t like a teacher and provoke them – the pupils video the teacher arguing with them in the heat of the moment and publish it online. It is devastating for the teacher and they hung themself.

And a further scenario – pupils make a video on their mobiles of children wrestling and publish it. A few weeks later, the police arrive with a complaint from a parent who feels the school is a violent place.

Very interesting – what do you think? Any ideas of your own on this subject? You might gain further insight by listening to Edtechroundup (ETRU) Podcast 4!

Here are a couple of movies of ideas from the first running of the Creativity in eTwinning workshop this morning.

The first shows some of the ideas raised about creativity and what it feels like to be creative.

The second are the reflections of the Sunglasses group on what they consider to be the ideal conditions for creativity to happen.

A really interesting seminar with lots of discussion about creativity and innovation.

Key ideas included the need for freedom, for space and for the acceptance of diversity; the need to spark ideas in one another, to accept that there are no right and wrong ideas and that the best conditions for creativity can be different for each person. Here are a number of photos taken of the ideas sparked by the session. Perhaps you’d like to add your own comments.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Here is a compilation of my photos of the exhibition so far!

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eTwinning conference Prague 2009, originally uploaded by lisibo.

I’ve been blogging all weekend from the European eTwinning Conference in Prague on the special blog set up for the event. I’ve also been tweeting our activities when I’ve had a chance.

Thought I’d put some of the posts on ¡Vámonos! as well! If you’re interested, there are many more posts by other delegates found on http://blog.eun.org/etwinningconference2009/