Category: blogs

I received an email on Thursday from a young man called Matt J at Tutorful:

My name is Matt and i’m getting in touch today with some great news – ¡Vámonos! has been featured in our Top 50 Spanish Learning Resources.

As you know, there’s hundreds if not thousands of sites offering Spanish resources, but we love yours! Which is exactly why you were chosen – you give great tips and tricks to teachers, allowing them to find new ways to spread their knowledge and passion – this is why we wanted to share it with our audience.

Well, that was a surprise!

I headed straight over to the article in question and discovered that I’m in good company alongside sites like OneThirdStories, Rockalingua, Spanish Playground, Duolingo and Calico Spanish that are very familiar to me as well as some new discoveries. For example  Spanish Blog 365 that has a Spanish language podcast of about ten minute each day. I think the episodes about festivals are particularly helpful – for example, the folk art of La Catrina dolls  and El Día de Reyes.  I found an interesting post about Why teach your child Spanish? on Alhambra Spanish site and another on World Language Cafe about challenging stereotypes. It was also good to be reminded of sites like Spanish Games and Spanish Town.

I’m very touched by the description of my blog:

 ¡Vámonos! is an enchanting and enlightening collection of blog posts sharing teachers experiences and expertise, telling tales of techniques tried and regaling us with how they worked and failed, as well as ways to think about things differently, so as best to become better teachers.

And I’m especially grateful to Tutorful for going to the trouble of explaining to readers why my latest post is about Lithuanian not Spanish!

Have a read for yourself and see if you find a gem that could help you!

And if you don’t find what you want there, why not try Zapatito Inglés, LightBulb Languages, Changing Phase, or Rachel Hawkes.

SaveSave

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.

I really enjoyed Neil Jones’ presentation at ALL NorthEast Spanish day.

You can find all sorts of ideas and resources on his blog – http://mfljones.wordpress.com  – well worth a look whatever phase you teach.

I loved some of the advertisements he showed.  Here are two of them.  Torres has been forgiven and I love funny dogs.

Pesi – Fernando Torres

httpv://youtu.be/nd7fc5iFL4g

Pancho, el perro que ganó el Primitivo

httpv://youtu.be/vwpbAsAzLf4

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!

On Tuesday I was in sunny (yes, it was sunny!) Manchester, delivering my AQA course.

Apart from the problems with the internet, I believe a good day was had by all – lunch was once more a highlight!

Rather than repeat all the links, can I refer you to my last post where you will find all the ‘new’ links about PLL, and also some recommendations from other delegates of sites and learning materials that they’ve found useful.

I forgot last week to put a link to a resource listing many many games and quick activities for the PLL classroom, so here it is.

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

Here is the Slidecast of my second presentation from Brighton.

Apologies for the audio cutting out before the end – no idea what happened there!  Perhaps the iRiver overheated!

Apologies to @wizenedcrone for forgetting her real name – it’s Fiona Joyce!!!

And the German site I mentioned was called GenkiGerman.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

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/

Via my FriendFeed, I was asked by John Johnston (via Twitter!) what type of blog I had, linking to Typealyzer. Being a nosey, inquisitive soul, I decided to find out! And what I found was rather interesting.

I’m forever doing quizzes and surveys on Facebook like Which Sesame Street puppet are you? (Zoey) Which Heroes power do you have? (Peter Petrelli) and Which Scrubs character are you? (Elliot) and frankly, whilst amusing, they interest me for about 10 seconds before I move on to poking someone or finding out if I remember the 80s.

However, this captured my attention for much longer. I put in my URL as requested and was given the following analysis.

And apart from the bit about being impulsive (have to work at that!) and following things through (which I do!), I’d say it was rather accurate! especially the bit about sitting still and remaining inactive!

But even more interesting was the next bit which analysed my brain activity.

Made me think – why am I so low on feeling, intuition and imagination? I’d say I was that way inclined but my blog doesn’t. Perhaps it’s the way it’s analysed – not sure if it’s on the last post or on the whole thing. Perhaps I’ll have another go in a week or so and see if it tells me anything different.

If you’ve got a blog, I’d be interested to know what it says about you. I did check a few and discovered that Chris Fuller is a Doer like me, Joe Dale and Oscar Stringer are Guardians, Tim Rylands is a Mechanic, Tom Barrett is a Scientist and Jo Rhys Jones is a Duty Fulfiller.

Karen aka Spanishblog has, for the second time in a week, pointed me in the direction of an interesting Spanish resource – this time, Lingus.tv.

Based in Barcelona, Lingus.tv uses its own situation comedy ‘5 y acción’ to teach useful phrases through short – and usually rather amusing – episodes featuring Paco, Sandro, Eva, Michael and Agatha. There are three different levels offered – Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced – with titles like ¿Dónde está mi bikini? (where’s my bikini?), Mi primer novio (my first boyfriend)and Espiando a Agatha (spying on Agatha).

I’ve watched several of the episodes, and a key feature seems to be the quirky ending or sting in the tail. See the latest example.

Each clip has subtitles in Spanish.
On the site there is a transcript of the dialogue.
At the click of a button, the dialogue is translated into English.
There are grammar notes pertinent to the episode, with an audio recording of the phrase / expression in question.
The clips are searchable by topic, objective and skill, as well as level.

The site offers advice on how to use the videos and also has a blog – the latest post talks about the benefits of second language acquistion.

I think it’s a good way of making a good start at learning some phrases at the same time as being entertained. I particularly like the use of more colloquial (and sometimes colourful!) language that can be missed in some other learning tools. Looking forward to seeing more episodes!! I’ll leave you with another episode – this one’s for beginners.