Fed up at going back to work after the Bank Holiday? Here’s a quick guide to How to celebrate Cinco de mayo!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcwW6wQGyVQ&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=1]

Hope you’re all having a lovely Bank Holiday. A little clip to amuse you all on this, Star Wars Day! You can’t go wrong with the Muppets!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJVIx95LyLk&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1]

Language teacher? Fancy finding meeting up with other language teachers for an hour or so without leaving your own home? Why not join in the Bank Holiday MFL Flashmeeting at 9pm GMT tomorrow (Monday). All you need to join in is a computer with speakers although a microphone and a webcam will allow you to get more involved.

The brainchild of Joe Dale, you can read all about it on his blog here including instructions on how to join in by signing the wiki, and how to make sure you’re prepared.

The suggested agenda is –

• what is your favourite technology at the moment and how is it enhancing language learning?
• the Rose Review and the proposals that technology be at the core of the primary curriculum
• the value of creating your personal learning network and does the microblogging tool have a place in the classroom?
• Web 2.0 CPD opportunities for next academic year – anyone like to organise a conference for language teachers interested in using ICT?

NB – the wiki is looking very full so if you find you can’t get in, please don’t despair. Master of technology Mr Dale will make sure that you can see the replay as soon as the meeting is over and will no doubt blog it too – unless I get there first ;o)

Many of you who are regular visitors may have been puzzled at one time or another by a odd munching noise that started a few seconds after the page opened and went on sporadically whilst you read, Some worked out what it was, others remained puzzled, whilst still more asked me what it was.

For those who are still none the wiser, the noise was Señorita Ovejita Rosita, my virtual pet pink pig, who was a bit of a greedy guts and was constantly munching grass. There was an ‘off’ switch for her noise and as I had set it to ‘off’ I was unaware of how noisy she was.

However, after she freaked out attendees at a recent Flashmeeting and provoked comment in the chat, I felt enough was enough, and Señorita Ovejita Rosita has been moved on to greater things.

Her replacement is the altogether more placid (and silent!) Pablito Pingüino. Feel free to toss him a fish every so often – he’d very much like that.

Following on from my post on Thursday about Teachmeet ASN-SEN, I have now extracted the audio from my very brief presentation using Audacity and Soundflower, levelled it with the Levelator, edited it to remove the numerous ‘ums’ and published as episode 5 of my podcast – )Lisibo talks!
Feeling very proud of myself (and I can now recognise the wave pattern of an ‘um’!

Make sure you catch the replay of the whole meeting though as it is well worth listening to the other presenters who were brilliant! See for yourself below – and watch here.

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!

I was privileged to be asked by David Noble (@parslad) to join TeachMeet ASN-SEN Online tonight and invited to speak as well! A huge privilege when you look at the other speakers!

I choose to talk briefly about using puppets and sound recording to encourage speaking skills in the classroom. As I teach languages, my examples came from my experience in the primary language learning classroom but, as I said, are equally applicable in other contexts.

If you want to catch what I said, you can watch the replay here

And here are some posts I’ve previously made about using puppets in the classroom –
Puppets! (video at the bottom of the post)
Los animales hablan
Inspired in IKEA pt 2

And about using sound recording-
5MW on Podomatic

And also moblogging –
La Primavera
Saved by the blog

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!

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Hotel du Vin, originally uploaded by lisibo.

This weekend I discovered the ideal way of networking and sharing!

I’d been invited to Cambridge, along with Steph Hopkins, by Leigh McClelland with the idea of putting our heads together and sharing ideas about language teaching, as well as having some fun!

I’ve got to say that I think i got more from Leigh and Steph than I gave, but we chatted constantly with laptops primed for all of Saturday, not even breaking when we went to the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge for the biggest cream tea ever seen, followed by cocktails, and eventually calling out for Chinese takeaway at about 10pm!

This is SUCH a good model for CPD – I’d recommend it to anyone.

Thanks to Leigh for having us, and to Leigh and Steph for their inspirational ideas – they are truely very clever ladies!!

Courtesy of @charte , a new Twitter follower, I’ve just discovered Picture trail, a tool for making pretty slideshows of your photos. Whilst you can’t add music like on Animoto or OneTrueMedia, I do like the pretty effects, backgrounds and borders you can add to make attractive slideshows.

Have a look at the one I’ve just made of pictures of me climbing a wall at the recent Outdoor Show at the NEC – no mean feat as it was my first time climbing and I have very bad vertigo!

And read Chris’ post for ideas of how to use it in class!