Category: voki

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.

You know you’re doing something right when you ask a class to write a Christmas poem and several kids ask you for a Spanish dictionary – in a Literacy lesson!!

I have to explain that as well as teaching Spanish, I teach other subjects too and whilst I like to integrate Spanish into other areas of the curriculum, on this occasion I had meant them to write in English. However, I wasn’t going to discourage them so off they went to fetch the dictionaries. I did advise them to stick to a simple structure and suggested ‘Navidad es….’ as a repeated line but otherwise left them to it!

Most of the class did write poems in English – although several finished their English one then wrote in Spanish too – but there were three or four Spanish ones. We shared our some of our poems and, using an Easispeak microphone, we recorded some of them (sadly didn’t have time for all of them but we’ll do it next week!) Then, at lunchtime, we made them into Voki. They’re on the school website, but here are two Spanish ones.

One is written as an acrostic using Regalos as its theme.

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267, ’52a91f93ccdfb6f325a8d09584aab6c9′, 1033309, 1, ”, 0);

Get a Voki now!

The other was written by a lovely girl who finds literacy very tricky so I was really proud of her!

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267, ‘dc8a0e377b89808645868c8b762622f7’, 1032816, 1, ”, 0);

Get a Voki now!

Yesterday saw a repeat of the Primary Languages Conference that was held in Coventry in June, this time in Bromsgrove to cover the South of the region.

Held in the lovely Bromsgrove Hilton, we were treated to a lovely lunch (always important on a training day!) as well as some great sessions on such things as Numeracy and MFL, Parachute games, Music and MFL and The International Dimension.

Eight lucky individuals took part in an Animation workshop with Oscar Stringer and had great fun producing short animations in just over an hour and half. Thanks to the British Council eTwinning, the lucky few took away their animations and Oscar’s animation PDF on a memory stick! :o)

Find more videos like this on Animation For Education

I delivered a session on Exciting ICT in the PLL Classroom, looking at delicious, Voki, Voicethread and Audacity. As promised, the presentation and notes are below for those who attended and also for those who didn’t!

Exciting ICT in the PLL classroom.

And the day ended with the lovely Steven Fawkes of ALL once more stunning and inspiring us all with his ideas on Performance and Motivation, culminating in the performance of La Banane, a new and innovative take on Kylie’s Can’t get you out of my head!!

And I won a lovely soft Spanish calendar in the raffle courtesy of Little Linguist. I eagerly await its arrival! :o)

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

DSCN1256, originally uploaded by lisibo.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m currently in Spain, in Madrid at a bilateral eTwinning meeting for Spanish and English teachers looking for partners – for eTwinning projects.

The meeting is coming to an end today after three days of frantic activity as teachers from both countries really threw themselves into the task of making friends and influencing one another. After a treasure hunt around the sites of central Madrid, numerous three course meals and several copas de vino, everyone has found a partner or partners, and begun to formulate project ideas. So it’s been a very successful meeting – and some of the project ideas that people are sharing as I type are really interesting and creative!

One partnership are going to use digital storytelling and video to share talents between their schools with pupils acting as a Simon Cowell and judging the talents of their partner pupils.

Another group are planning on looking at festivals and cultural events along the lines of ‘similar but different’ – I know that this type of project leads pupils to not only learn about their partners’ culture but also to reflect on their own!

‘One liners’ will be based around a ‘guessing game’ involving proverbs in Spanish and English, with the partners schools exchanging one line each week that will be displayed for the pupils who will work out / guess what it means. The partners hope that this will lead to discussion of the imagery of proverbs and a comparison of similarities and differences. Apparently this idea was formulated yesterday in the middle of the session I delivered on Voki Voicethread and Audacity in eTwinning after I shared the Voicethread highlighted in the previous post called What could it mean? :o)

Another group were inspired to create a NING network in my session (and I only mentioned those in passing!) and are planning on a monthly Voicethread activity about the City of the Future – environment, culture, lifestyle etc.

I’ve had some very interesting conversations over these few days about languages and technology, and also about the use of technology in general. One delegate told me on the first night that he hated technology, couldn’t do anything technological and that his own children were banned from using computers as they are ‘evil’. Mmm! I suggested that he might like to learn how ICT works alongside his children, thus knowing what they were doing and learning at the same time, and we had a discussion about educating rather than banning but didn’t seem overly swayed by my argument! So I took that as a challenge for my session and was pleased as punch when he made a Voki in my session and declared that perhaps he could do something after all. And in the report back, he’s just suggested using online Playstation competitions as a way of maintaining and establishing links between the schools. :O)

Here’s my presentation below – and the notes I made too.
You can’t put Keynote presentations in Slideshare or Pages documents in DocStoc so the formatting is a little odd as I had to export it as .ppt and .doc :O(

Notes for Madrid – Get more Business Documents

Every time I have heard Drew Buddie speak, I have been amused, informed and challenged to go away and investigate – and this time was no exception. Drew aka @digitalmaverick delivered a session on Web2.0 tools in his own inimitable style, taking his inspiration from Alan Levine aka CogDogBlog / CogDogRoo and his 50 ways to tell a story. You can find a full list on the CogDogRoo wiki but we only had time to look a few of them including Bubbleshare, Ourstory.com, Animoto and Kerpoof.

With @pj23harry, @jokingswear @orunner and @lisibo tweeting proceedings, it was unsurprising that Twitter was explored in some depth with most of the session attendees signing up for accounts and starting to befriend one another. Drew encouraged us all to write our Twitter names on or name badges so that we would be able to recognise who had a Twitter profile and follow them. This fitted well with the big screen in the hall that displayed all tweets to @iowconference08, the conference Twitter account.

We also had a look at Voki and discussed how it might be used, and touched on Voicethread, before thinking about wikis and blogs. Drew showed people how to sign up for a Blogger blog, and also mentioned NING but as blogs and NING are blocked on IoW, that was something that people had to go away to investigate further.

Although I knew about many of these sites and tools, it was good to be reminded of them and offered ideas for using them. It was also great that people chipped in little bits of information that they had to share, and that included people via Twitter. And of course, the entertainment factor was high, especially as the master computer for the room was at the back and Drew had to keep running up and down the room to operate things until he coopted Paul Harrington into doing it for him ;o)

Not the bumper crop we had hoped to post but we did manage to finish three despite crashing laptops, intermittent Internet connection and microphones that wouldn’t work!

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”80d16db8fd5bdeec3b1b64a33263cbe4″,927156, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”c07ccd4ea46c28bd386b6a3e9becb6fe”,927037, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”c56e4e9b4c20cc98a60aa8987728e07c”,927047, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

I’m just showing 6VH how to get around our little problem with Voki not recording directly by using Audacity. So brace yourself for lots of Voki coming at you this afternoon ;o)

Thanks to Zara in 5SD for letting me use her sound file to demonstrate!

AC_Voki_Embed(300,400,”b8bd88160d0bccd5edb01550390399fb”,926822, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

Guest blogger – Adam 6VH
I enjoyed making Vokis so much that I decided to make one at home! This one is not Spanish but I managed to play around with the accents and this is the result!
AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”32ecc2ac762e91ec1ba4e5933bb3662b”,906148, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

PS I know he’s hijacked my blog ;o) Sra. Stevens

We’ve had fun and games with crashing computers so we’re hoping this will work :os

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”f1b21fc04e8d7845368fe69aa0630d79″,905754, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!