Acabo de leer un artículo que me chifló sobre la Historia del Lego. Como madre de dos niños de seis y nueve años, no puedo escapar del Lego – han pedido de Papá Noel el Lego de la Guerra en las Galaxias.

Noticias Locas hoy habla de The Lego MiniFig Timeline que muestra los muñequitos de acción Lego desde 1978 hasta hoy.

Ahora estoy lista hablar con mis hijos sobre el Lego con más autoridad ;o)

I first used Animoto during the Voices of the World project last year when we made a short 30 second video featuring pictures that the children had drawn of Spain accompanied by a rather dubious rendition of the Spanish Himno Nacional by most of Key Stage 2.

Animoto describes itself as follows:

Animoto produces TV-quality music videos using your photos in just minutes.

It’s so simple to do too. Choose a song as the soundtrack to your video and Animoto will analyze every nuance of it. Producing a totally unique video each time, no two videos are ever the same.

I thought it was a good tool then although the limit to 30 seconds for the free version was a little annoying. A while back, I saw it reported that educators could have a free account (saving you $30) and I was sure I’d registered then. However, it seems I hadn’t as when I went back today, I didn’t have an account. So I rapidly registered and began playing!

I’d been reminded of Animoto by a Twitter message saying that you could now add text to Animoto. So, having uploaded lots of pictures of flowers taken in my garden from iPhoto as a test Animoto video and then remixed it, I set about investigating the new facility.

I uploaded a set of photos from my Flickr account entitled Spanish food and drink. Next I sorted them a bit so that they were grouped vaguely. My first text screen was the title page, then I added a section title – Tapas and a comments about gazpacho – Me gusta mucho :o) . I then thought I’d make use of a set of pictures to tell a story – a man choosing from the menu and then enjoying his morning break – thanks to my model ;o) I was a little disappointed that you couldn’t subtitle the pictures as I’d envisaged making a slideshow to teach food words. However, you could insert a text slide before or after each picture for revision I guess! Having selected a suitable piece of music from the Animoto library, I let Animoto work its magic and voilà – a video that can be emailed, uploaded to Youtube, downloaded and embedded as it is below.

If you want to learn more about Animoto, why not check out the site or the case studies section where you can find out how educators have used Animoto in their classroom.

I’ll be exploring further and will keep you informed of how things go!!

Yesterday saw a repeat of the Primary Languages Conference that was held in Coventry in June, this time in Bromsgrove to cover the South of the region.

Held in the lovely Bromsgrove Hilton, we were treated to a lovely lunch (always important on a training day!) as well as some great sessions on such things as Numeracy and MFL, Parachute games, Music and MFL and The International Dimension.

Eight lucky individuals took part in an Animation workshop with Oscar Stringer and had great fun producing short animations in just over an hour and half. Thanks to the British Council eTwinning, the lucky few took away their animations and Oscar’s animation PDF on a memory stick! :o)

Find more videos like this on Animation For Education

I delivered a session on Exciting ICT in the PLL Classroom, looking at delicious, Voki, Voicethread and Audacity. As promised, the presentation and notes are below for those who attended and also for those who didn’t!

Exciting ICT in the PLL classroom.

And the day ended with the lovely Steven Fawkes of ALL once more stunning and inspiring us all with his ideas on Performance and Motivation, culminating in the performance of La Banane, a new and innovative take on Kylie’s Can’t get you out of my head!!

And I won a lovely soft Spanish calendar in the raffle courtesy of Little Linguist. I eagerly await its arrival! :o)

[flickr video=3023021780 secret=e4e1d47f70 w=400 h=300]

This afternoon I had the pleasure of the company of Year 2 for a whole afternoon of Spanish!! So I decided to indulge my creative urges and let them loose with the puppets! This caused great excitement – obviously – perhaps a little more than was strictly necessary, but heigh ho!

The idea was to create short role plays in pairs in Spanish using puppets so that we could safely record them using my camera’s video facility, then upload them and the kids would be able to watch them before going home. Best laid plans…

I handed out the puppets by naming them in Spanish and asking ¿Quién quiere el mono? for example – the pupils had to guess the animal to ‘win’ the right to hold it! That was fine. However, as they put the finger puppets on their fingers, the pupils’ excitement was a little more exuberant than foreseen and it took a while to calm down sufficiently to set the task. Of course, the pupils immediately wanted to start talking to one another using the puppets and I didn’t want to squash that urge, just channel it ;o)

Next problem was that all previous knowledge seemed to have popped out of their heads and for some reason there were very few who could even remember how to answer ¿Qué tal? let alone ask it! However, after a quick revision session we rehearsed and after break we had a go at recording our animal role play, using Smartboard backgrounds as our backdrops.

Below you can see some of the results – some were better than others and, believe me, given the time and effort it took, I’m pleased we recorded anything!

I was thinking of doing some animation with them…. perhaps leave it until I’ve recovered :o)

[flickr video=3023167682 secret=e1360f4232 w=400 h=300]

[flickr video=3023205910 secret=b408940d0a w=400 h=300]

[flickr video=3023111110 secret=38ebc8f75a w=400 h=300]

Here are my photos from my three day stay in Madrid at the eTwinning conference.
Hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoy remembering taking them!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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DSCN1256, originally uploaded by lisibo.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m currently in Spain, in Madrid at a bilateral eTwinning meeting for Spanish and English teachers looking for partners – for eTwinning projects.

The meeting is coming to an end today after three days of frantic activity as teachers from both countries really threw themselves into the task of making friends and influencing one another. After a treasure hunt around the sites of central Madrid, numerous three course meals and several copas de vino, everyone has found a partner or partners, and begun to formulate project ideas. So it’s been a very successful meeting – and some of the project ideas that people are sharing as I type are really interesting and creative!

One partnership are going to use digital storytelling and video to share talents between their schools with pupils acting as a Simon Cowell and judging the talents of their partner pupils.

Another group are planning on looking at festivals and cultural events along the lines of ‘similar but different’ – I know that this type of project leads pupils to not only learn about their partners’ culture but also to reflect on their own!

‘One liners’ will be based around a ‘guessing game’ involving proverbs in Spanish and English, with the partners schools exchanging one line each week that will be displayed for the pupils who will work out / guess what it means. The partners hope that this will lead to discussion of the imagery of proverbs and a comparison of similarities and differences. Apparently this idea was formulated yesterday in the middle of the session I delivered on Voki Voicethread and Audacity in eTwinning after I shared the Voicethread highlighted in the previous post called What could it mean? :o)

Another group were inspired to create a NING network in my session (and I only mentioned those in passing!) and are planning on a monthly Voicethread activity about the City of the Future – environment, culture, lifestyle etc.

I’ve had some very interesting conversations over these few days about languages and technology, and also about the use of technology in general. One delegate told me on the first night that he hated technology, couldn’t do anything technological and that his own children were banned from using computers as they are ‘evil’. Mmm! I suggested that he might like to learn how ICT works alongside his children, thus knowing what they were doing and learning at the same time, and we had a discussion about educating rather than banning but didn’t seem overly swayed by my argument! So I took that as a challenge for my session and was pleased as punch when he made a Voki in my session and declared that perhaps he could do something after all. And in the report back, he’s just suggested using online Playstation competitions as a way of maintaining and establishing links between the schools. :O)

Here’s my presentation below – and the notes I made too.
You can’t put Keynote presentations in Slideshare or Pages documents in DocStoc so the formatting is a little odd as I had to export it as .ppt and .doc :O(

Notes for Madrid – Get more Business Documents

As I’m presenting at a British council conference in Madrid this weekend, I’ve been researching Voki and Voicethread and uses thereof.

I’ll post my presentation and notes etc after the event, but this particular Voicethread made by Silvia Tolisano aka Langwitches came to mind and I thought I’d share it now as I think it’s genius!

Basically, there are many photos contributed by people from around the world of something that is particular to their country – could be a tradition, a habit, a routine, a custom – in order to promote intercultural dialogue about our similarities and differences. People are invited to contribute – see the whatcoulditmean wiki for details – by uploading photographs and also by surmising what the photos might mean!

A simple idea but great fun and thought provoking too.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4zUV0CHdbE&hl=en&fs=1]

A beautiful story for the end of October – made me go ‘ah!’

Here are the words in case you want them!

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clothes line, originally uploaded by daniel n. reid.

Having accosted him at the bus stop, I had the pleasure of travelling from Cowes to Newport with Adam Sutcliffe last Friday. Not quite sure why or how the subject arose, but I do know that at some point during the journey I said ‘This weekend I will mainly be wearing red’ as Adam reminded me of it on Saturday evening when I was in my fourth red outfit of the weekend saying ‘you weren’t joking, were you?!’

So, it amused me to read the following article on BBC Mundo:

Más sexy si se viste de rojo.
¿Quiere volver a un hombre loco de amor? Vístase de rojo. O al menos eso fue lo que encontró un estudio científico.

Basically, it suggests that if a woman wears red, she is seen as more attractive and more worth spending money on by men (but not by women!)

I’d just decided I would stick to one colour to save problems of deciding what to wear jewellery and accessory-wise and I’d just bought some lovely clothes in Barcelona. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?? ;o)