Category: presentations

Thanks to Alex Blagona and Joe Dale who recorded and edited the audio, here’s the Slidecast of my recent presentation at Language World in Leicester.

And if you want to listen on your mp3 player, you can download my podcast Lisibo talks!

On Tuesday I made my way to Cambridge for the second time in four days to deliver a day’s training on behalf of CILT at Anglia Ruskin University.

The course was entitled NEXT STEPS IN ICT FOR THE PRIMARY LANGUAGE CLASSROOM and promised to address collaborative working, whole class ICT, digital voicerecording and assessment amongst other things.

I had a lovely day with the delegates and hope that they all went away with one or to things to try out in their classrooms – there was great enthusiasm for wikis and Voki, and TTS should expect a few orders for their sound recording products in the near future – especially as I need a new Easispeak as I seem to have left mine behind :O(

I made a wiki for the event on which I’ve put all my presentations and also as a place for the delegates to ‘play around’ with using wikis. I did record the sessions – mostly!- but in the afternoon we went off at a tangent and the audio won’t fit my presentations so i won’t be making slidecasts of everything. However, I have put the presentations below as they are full of hyperlinks to useful resources.

Hope you find it useful!

And if you want to go on the course, it is repeated in Lancaster on 19th May. Contact CILT for more details!

NB the first slideshow actually starts on slide 18 as slide 22 was triggered to the first 20 slides as examples!

I was lucky enough to be asked to present this year at Language World, the annual conference of the Association for Language Learning (ALL), which took place at University of Leicester on 3rd and 4th April.

My presentation was entitled Absorbing Language Learning and offered ideas to engage enthuse and stimulate language learners, particularly focusing on the Primary Language Learning context although the ideas are all transferable.

I was really glad to be on the programme near the beginning of the conference as I was then able to relax and enjoy the rest of it. And I was also really chuffed that my session was so full – we only just had enough chairs!

As promised, here is the presentation with links to all the resources. The battery on my iRiver sadly gave up midway through the session, but the lovely Joe Dale had given the equally lovely Alex Blagona an iRiver to record me too so I will shortly add the audio to the Slideshare and then you’ll be able to hear me too!

Links to sites and resources can also be found in my delicious bookmarks under lw09

photos – http://www.?ickr.com/photos/emerging/

A quick update on the presentations from the Primary Language Show in Liverpool. Last week I published my presentations Join El Carnaval de los Animales and You and Youtube via Slideshare, and embedded them on my blog with other resources from the talks.

I recorded the sessions on my trusty ‘Toblerone’ aka my iRiver, and, as I was off work with a sick son this Thursday, I had time to edit the audio using Audacity and the Levelator. I then linked the audio to my Slideshare, synched it to the presentation and published it on Slideshare as a Slidecast. So if you now go to the blogposts, or to my Slideshare page, you will get the audio too! Magic!

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!!

Today I was supposed to be in Leicester speaking about eTwinning and the potential of using Voki, Voicethread and Audacity in projects. However, the snow got in the way so I’m not there but at home. I sent my presentation and notes to Jenny from the British Council so those brave souls that made it could have a look at what I might have said.

Below you will find all that I would have presented today given the chance.

Notes for Madrid – Free Legal Forms

Madrid – Free Legal Forms

And here’s the slideshare related to Whitehouse Common’s awardwinning project – if you want to see examples of the sort of things we did, leave me a message and I’ll upload some of those too.