Category: online

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.

Just realised that I hadn’t blogged the Wallwisher made by Year 5 just before Language World.

Created with Padlet

My love of trees is becoming very well known now – I now get sent all sorts of tree related links.

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!

I’m very excited to pass on the news from Val Thornber of Little Tales of the Unexpected and Beelingua fame.

Her message reads –

I am delighted to inform you that a unique collection of GrowstoryGrow’s wonderful stories has just been published by Beelingua Products Ltd (makers of Little Tails of the Unexpected).

The stories are all designed to help primary school children effectively learn a foreign language.

Each story has sentence-building tasks, games, fun lesson plans and many other useful resources.

All of these stories are currently available “Free of Charge” for a trial period.

COMING SOON – over 100 extra stories will be available in many languages including German, Italian, Urdu, Russian, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic and Polish.

Over the course of the next few months we will be regularly publishing these new stories. If you would like us to tell you about these new publications you need to subscribe to our newsletter.

Please forward tell parents, teachers and friends who you think may find GrowStoryGrow stories useful. Why not try out the stories with your children TODAY and please let us have any feedback by sending an email to Valerie Thornber (creator of GSG): val@growstorygrow.com

To access the stories you will need to log-in to the website www.growstorygrow.com

There you will receive a trial login and be able to try out the product for a while.

I love Les sacs en plastique – ver
y simple but with an important message; and Le monstre de la musique is very amusing too – if only it were in Spanish, I could use it wth Year 5 in their current unit of work!

Can’t wait for more languages and more stories to be added.

If yu check out the site in detail, you’ll find details of the methodology behind the resource, how the Scheme of work will be comprised and also details of pricing for September.

Well done Val and keep up the hard work!

One of the sessions I attended at the PLS was all about using Fairytales and Fables in PLL and employing children’s thinking skills. It was led by Louise Harty from Northumberland, and spoke to the wonderful resources available on the NGfL – particularly Riccioliodoro and Les souris courageuses

As I admitted to Louise when I saw here later, I’ve used the resources on the NGfL, specifically Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood in Spanish, and have made use of some of the activities discussed during the session without really grasping the full power of them. So it was good to discover the thinking and theory behind it all.

This has implications for thinking skills – Louise opened by reflecting that learning should be active, meaningful, challenging, collaborative, mediated and reflective. She talked about Lev Vygotsky and his zones of proximal development. Vygotsky felt that it is children’s interaction with others through language that most strongly influences the levels of conceptual understanding they can reach. He also believed that we can learn from others, both the same age and of a higher age and developmental level – learning is a social activity and thinking skills could be the road to better language learning.

The progression of learning in PMFL was said to be

• nouns
• words to describe nouns
• short phrase
• making own sentences
• able to use verbs confidently

and the scheme of learning activities that Louise was presenting follow this pattern.
At each stage, opportunities are given to explore concepts behind the knowledge in an unthreatening manner.

Here are the success criteria for each objective-

• nouns – I understand gender (not teaching it but exploring it)
• adjectives – I understand how adjectives work
• short phrases – I understand simple word order.
• sentences – I understand sentence construction
• use verbs confidently – I understand how verbs work

By using scaffolding early on, pupils in PMFl can reach level 5 equivalent skills. Louise questioned why, if pupils are conceptually able to reach level 5 in Maths science and Literacy, we limit them in MFL?

By moving from fairytales to fables the pupils are moving from familiar to less familiar stories with more complex language.

Ricciolodoro è i Tre Orsi was the first story in focus.
By using Storyboarding pupils were developing sequencing and deductive skills. They went on to classifying nouns, exercising sorting and clasifying skills, using language of similarity and differences whilst making connections. They ahve to articulate their reasoning with everyone bringing their own learning and skills
We did an activity in which we were exploring gender – not being taught it but discovering it. If you present ‘the cognitive conflict’ children discover for themselves and it much more powerful than being told.

Les souris courageuses – une fable
We began looking at the activity Map from memory, a visual, walking dictation type of activity in which we were communicating the position of items in a picture from memory wthout touching. The key was – How did we tackle the task? Were we methodical and divide the picture into sections? Did we look for likely places to put words? Did we match adjectives in advance of instructions?

We then moved onto the construction of phrases and sentences using a grid, then joining with connectives. Although some may not be strictly correct in terms of likelihood or sense, in the feedback you get quality of language. Louise emphasised that the teacher’s role is facilitating in thsi scenario rather than giving learning. In this exercise, the thinking was interpreting and oragnising info whilst the children were talking about how to work together as a team – team strategies lead to spontaneous language.

The next activity involved a Venn diagram which we used for making deductions about adjectives. Conclusions reached included that you often add an e to make feminine adjectives and ones that are the same end in e already. The exercise then gave opportunities for more sentence making opportunities.

Sadly Louise ran out of time to explain the Fortune line and Fact or fiction, but we did have a quick look at classifying verbs, matching infinitives to verb forms and then splitting the verb cards as we saw fit. We were encouraged to split them into description and action verbs, and then to discuss our conclusions.

The interactive stories and SMART notebook files of characters and for retelling the story are available on the NGfL website and the accompanying resources are available for purchase £149.
I’ve used the Goldilocks stuff in Spanish very successfully with Year2 who discovered all sorts of things about language through it. And now I understand why!!

Originally courtesy of Lifehacker, and then various tweets throughout the day, I found out today about a new site called Busuu.

Busuu is a language learning site with an element of social networking. You can choose modules that you wish to ‘study’ in a wide variety of languages and add them to your area, learning the vocabulary with a series of tasks including audio and written composition. And you can also offer help to others in the language (or languages) that you already know by commenting on and helping others with their tasks. So you have the opportunity of studying whenever you fancy, and receive prompt feedback from native and / or experienced speakers.

I’ve signed up to study German (beginners) French (intermediate as I’m out of practice!!) and Basque (beginners) – there are exercises etc for the first two (indicated by the trees) but Basque is represented in my garden by a lovely red plant, so I’ll have to learn via chat and interaction with other users who speak Basque. I wonder how that’ll go???
And I must say that I’m disturbed by how much I’m enjoying correcting mistajkes and offering advice when I hate marking so much!

Go on a video tour of the site and find out for yourself!

At the moment the site is in Beta so everyone is enjoying Premium membership – there will be free Basic membership once Beta is finished according to the subscription section.

PS I know that the German tree is labelled English – no idea why!!

And, as José reports, you can capture the programmes in RealPlayer for use in the classroom. Great news I say.