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!

I was shocked the first time I son talked about ‘stealing’ a friend’s idea. ‘but my teacher told me to do it!’ was his response to the look on my face.

Gone are the days when my planning was mine  alone and a colleague teaching the same lesson had to plan their own lesson. Pooling knowledge and ideas is positively encouraged, and I for one am VERY grateful for this.

Image from klmontgomery

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXT9-V9AimA

Very creative and amusing too!

It’s TeachMeetBrum tonight! Whoopee!

Not too late to come along – or join the online streaming if you’re too far away! Details here!

Below is my presentation – or the things I will talk about as I don’t do ‘slides’ for these things – I thought the idea was that you didn’t have any!

Random stuff we did this week!

1. Stories

We’ve used all sorts of storymaking tools – Storybird, Storyjumper, ZooBurst – but this week we discovered Little Bird Tales which allows you to narrate your story.

Here’s one I made earlier!

2. Postcrossing

Looking outward is something at which schools are becoming increasingly good. At Whitehouse Common we have a Connecting Classrooms project going on with India and a Comenius Reggio project with Barcelona.

One very simple way we’ve made looking to the world a day to day thing is by using Postcrossing, a postcard exchange site. I spoke about it in my talk at #ililc on eTwinning and mentioned how we’ve used GoogleMaps to have a constantly updated and graphic idea of where our cards are going to and coming from, as well as the display we made (below) which we’ve now had to dismantle as there were too many postcards!

3. Polldaddy

Son needed to do a survey for his Maths homework and complained that it was a bit silly setting that as there are only 4 people in our house. So we PollDaddy-ed Twitter! And he wrote the URL in his book so the teacher knew he’d not made it up!

4. International links

As I said our school has many links and here are some clips we’ve used to make Barcelona seem all the more real to our pupils and to provoke discussion.

• Used to inspire work on letters for WorldBookDay using iPod Touches to capture letters in our environment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYeVU2beaJc

• Used to discuss homes and housing in different countries

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUeFgN9YCMs

• Used to show pupils at our link school learning English

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbpw3qSyHvw

A new mini series starting today of ‘thoughts’.

This is increasingly what I aim for in my lessons – for pupils to discover for themselves, and to accept that there isn’t always an easy answer, that I am not a walking dictionary and Google is not the source of all knowledge.

Image from Colette Cassinelli

Following my post last night about Little Bird Tales and the problem with the accents on the title page, I received two comments before I woke this morning – one from Amiee Klem, co-founder of Little Bird Tales saying that they would sort out the accent issue I’d highlighted, and then another a coupel of hours later from her husband Michael telling me the problem was sorted.

THAT is good service for you!

This ‘story’ is a particular favourite.

Called El hecho y la opinión, it’s not really a story but a collaborative exercise in which 2nd grade pupils give a fact (un hecho) and an opinion (una opinión) about a picture in the book.

Good exercise to distinguish between facts and opinions – and an interesting use of the site!

And then there’s this great combination of storytelling, plasticine and history!

• Click to view my story.
• 

Gracias a @rubiales62 for sharing this wonderful storytelling site on Twitter.

Little Bird Tales is a storytelling site which allows you to write, illustrate and narrate stories and then save them to a public gallery or embed them on your own site. Your illustrations can be uploaded from file (so it’s possible to use photos or pictures made elsewhere) or you can use the on site paint box to draw your own. I’ve written a quick example below in which I imported a picture from my iPhoto library and then drawn on top. I found another Spanish story, and a French one,  in the Public Gallery too.
I like the way you can record a voiceover within the site -this adds an extra dimension to it as a storymaking site.

Good news – accents work well in the storybook.
Bad news – for some reason they don’t work on the title page!

 

• Click to view my story.
• 

Thanks to a tip off by Jane Baybrook on MFLResources for this video.

Very catchy!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFbWPMDLWlc

A really interesting video here from the RSA Animate series on how we use language.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

Warning – contains innuendo and (cartoon) nudity!