Category: podcasts

I’m currently experimenting with various Spanish units from the new QCA SoW for KS2. I’m using Unit 5 Los cuatro amigos with Year 3, El carnaval de los animales (Unit 11) with Year 4, Year 5 are doing Unit 14 Yo soy músico and Year 6 are looking forward to some café acting with Unit 23, Poner una cafetería.

I’ll report more fully when the units are completed as to how good, bad or indifferent I found them etc, but as a taster, I thought I’d share a snippet!

Hot off the press, here are Year 5 singing ‘Somos músicos’ with great gusto.

This is my first attempt at embedding a player on my blog – if it doesn’t work, you can listen tot he same audio from the Podomatic player on the right ;o)

Click here to get your own player.

5MW have been working on QCA Spanish Unit 14 Soy el músico this half term and today we gave our opinions about types of music. I thought after we’d sung our song and revised opinions and shared our reasons that they’d make posters to show their pinions – displays need changing!

But I felt like being different today!

So out came my laptop from home and my head / microphone combo. I set it up in the book corner and, having set the rest of the class off on their RE webquest about what priests do, I invited anyone interested to pop over to the recording booth and, using Audacity, record their opinion in Spanish.

I was so glad I did it as everyone of the volunteers enjoyed the experience, and the looks on their faces as they listened to themselves played back were priceless.

Zach’s comment made me laugh and cry at the same time!
As he listened to himself back, he said
‘Miss, have you done something to my voice?- I sound Spanish.’
I assured him that I couldn’t do that, and that the voice he heard was him –
‘That can’t be me Miss’

So, I’ve spent the evening uploading all the soundfiles to our Podomatic account (signed up last July and didn’t put anything on it until today!) and above is the first set of WCPS Spanish podcasts. Please leave comments if you wish – the pupils will be very encouraged (as will I!) I’m expecting more volunteers next week – we ran out of time today and one of the quietest girls in the class is first in the queue for next week!

Whilst at the Teachmeet at BETT this year I witnessed Doug Belshaw announcing the official launch of EdTechRoundup.

As Tom Barrett puts it on his blog, ‘ EdTechRoundup is a place where a group of UK-based educators come together for discussion and collaboration around the use of technology in education. We believe in pedagogically-sound uses of educational technology, but don’t believe in ramming Web 2.0 (or anything else for that matter) down people’s throats’
‘Our aim is to deliver common sense advice and guidance that is practical to teachers – much of what we will talk about has been tried and tested with our classes. The shows will be hosted by two different people each week – to see who is involved please visit the contacts page on the wiki.’ that you listen in too.

The first edition of the podcast went live last week. It is hosted by David Noble (who I have met) and Sinclair McKenzie (who I have virtually met) and features a short interview with Joe Dale on reasons to use blogs in the classroom. I had a chance to tune in yesterday and would recommend that you do too.

I particularly liked the discussion of www.classtools.net , a site I had heard of and meant to use but never got around to it! I was reminded of it at Teachmeet where the fruit machine was used to pick the order of presenters. The site offers the opportunity to create free games, activities and diagrams using Flash and is well worth an explore. I’ve already input the names of all the classes I’m teaching at the moment into random name picker and hope the kids will enjoy seeing their names spinning – and it’ll also save me being accused of only picking the children in my house!

Anyway – listen to the podcast and find out about this, and much much more. You can listen to it via the blog or through an iTunes feed.

Episode 2, presented by Tom Barrett and John Johnston will be available soon so stay tuned to learn more!