Category: blogging

I, amongst many many other people, used the extra day we have this year and blogged on Feb29th.net. Brainchild of @deputymitchell to get the world blogging in a simple and easy way, Feb29th.net has collected flags from 91 nations and been visited over 21,000 times. More importantly, thousands of people, young and old have added their post, however short, to the project. If you look at the tag cloud on the website, it’s great to see the size of the Under12 and 12-17 tags – the bigger the word, the more it appeared.

I read several posts and this one caught my eye. I hope “Harry Gardner” doesn’t mind me copying his blog post –  did ask him in the comments! Love that an under 12 has chosen to post so many reasons for language learning! I love number 6, and can tell you that you do need number 11 to learn a language (intensively especially!) as it doens’t just happen. Unfortunately.

My post is here.

It seems that someone likes my blog as ¡Vámonos! has been nominated for The Education Blog Awards.

Which is rather exciting!

Not sure who the kind person who nominated me was, but thank you!

If you feel like voting, click on the lovely badges below and you’ll be taken to the place to vote.  There are lots of other blogs there that I’d encourage you to peruse, especially the class and school blogs written by and for children.

The top ten in each category will then be judged by the illustrious panel to choose the winners.

Don’t think for a moment that I’ll win but it’s good to see primary languages represented on the list!

This evening I was very excited to be interviewed by David Noble aka @parslad as part of his PhD Edonis project – ‘an interpretivist study of the social web and PLNs’

Along with many others (there’s a list of my illustrious company here), I volunteered a while away to answer questions on my online learning and use of social media to help David with his research.  One of the things we all agreed is that we would be interviewed individually at some point during the two year process, and today it was my go.  I had the added ‘bonus’ of having my conversation broadcast live via iPadio.

I hope I answered David’s questions properly – I certainly talked a lot!  We talked about my online presence in various forms, especially Twitter, MFLResources Yahoo mail group and my blog, ¡Vámonos!, how my PLN was quite varied, and how sometimes it’s easier to ‘get on’ with people online although it’s good to meet face to face at times as well.

You can listen to the interview here

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.

I love it when I open my Inbox and come across an email that points me to a new resource. I received one such email tonight and loved it so much that I had to blog it immediately.

Wallwisher is a site that allows you to add multiple short posts on a wall. As JimmyP says in his email –

It’s got a lot of potential I think to encourage pupils to write in the
target language. The site lets you create a page or ‘Wall’ very
easily. You give the address of the page to the pupils and they double
click on the page and can then write a short post. They can even add a
picture/video although I haven’t tried this yet. When you create the
page you can set up some restrictions in terms of viewing and posting.

Jimmy posts an example that he’s made with his class – http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/miordenador Looked impressive so I decided to have a go!

My resulting wall is on the theme of Los planetas, linking into Yr5’s topic this term.
I’ve tried embedding a video – works well – and a picture – from wikicommonmedia

I’ll be inviting pupils to join in later on in the topic. This to me is a little like Tweeting and blogging at once. There is a limit to how many characters you can use so pupils are not expected to write a long post which I feel will appeal!

Thanks Jimmy for the heads up!

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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/

Many of you will know of Joe Dale and follow his marvellous blog, Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom. Joe is an SSAT Lead Practitioner and as part of his role, he delivers an SSAT seminar each year. This year he ran a day in Colchester on Blogging and Podcasting, and I am really pleased that he is going to repeat that day in the Midlands soon – on Thursday 29th January at Shirelands CLC to be precise.

As Joe says –

If you are interested in finding out more about the potential of blogging and podcasting to enhance language learning and offer personalised distance learning opportunities to your students, why not click here and download the flyer to apply to attend the course? It only costs £69 which includes lunch.

I can thoroughly recommend Joe’s seminars as they are always very instructive and full of ideas for enhancing language learning – and the ideas are all easily transferrable to other areas of the curriculum so it would be easy to share the outcomes with your whole school and for everyone to benefit.

If you need further persuasion, check out some of the comments from his session in Colchester– (bottom of post!)

I’ve mentioned EdTechRoundup on ¡Vámonos! before and have to say that I continue to be enlightened each Sunday night (when singing permits) by the chat about all things technological (and not so technological!) at the weekly Flashmeeting.

Therefore, I’m pleased to say that we’ve decided to share the conversations with others who cant attend or access the replay of the meeting, and today we’ve published the first of ‘ETR Weekly’ podcast in which we talk about starting out in the edublogosphere. You can listen to the podcast and see the show notes on the ETR blog – http://edtechroundup.com

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6000 Views, originally uploaded by andrew_mrt1976.

Whilst Spain were playing Italy this evening, an exciting thing happened to my Hit counter on ¡Vámonos! – it topped 6000!

As it reached 4000 in April – 26th April to be precise, that’s less than 2 months to amass another 2000 hits. I’m impressed!

In my 4000 hit post I said ‘Here’s to reaching 5000 by the end of the summer term’ – seems I need to aim higher!

Thank you so much to everyone for coming back – I’ll keep blogging as long as you keep reading :o)