¡Vámonos! – Page 85 – "The decision to learn a language is an act of friendship. It is an outstretched hand." John le Carré
 

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This afternoon I had the pleasure of the company of Year 2 for a whole afternoon of Spanish!! So I decided to indulge my creative urges and let them loose with the puppets! This caused great excitement – obviously – perhaps a little more than was strictly necessary, but heigh ho!

The idea was to create short role plays in pairs in Spanish using puppets so that we could safely record them using my camera’s video facility, then upload them and the kids would be able to watch them before going home. Best laid plans…

I handed out the puppets by naming them in Spanish and asking ¿Quién quiere el mono? for example – the pupils had to guess the animal to ‘win’ the right to hold it! That was fine. However, as they put the finger puppets on their fingers, the pupils’ excitement was a little more exuberant than foreseen and it took a while to calm down sufficiently to set the task. Of course, the pupils immediately wanted to start talking to one another using the puppets and I didn’t want to squash that urge, just channel it ;o)

Next problem was that all previous knowledge seemed to have popped out of their heads and for some reason there were very few who could even remember how to answer ¿Qué tal? let alone ask it! However, after a quick revision session we rehearsed and after break we had a go at recording our animal role play, using Smartboard backgrounds as our backdrops.

Below you can see some of the results – some were better than others and, believe me, given the time and effort it took, I’m pleased we recorded anything!

I was thinking of doing some animation with them…. perhaps leave it until I’ve recovered :o)

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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

As I’m presenting at a British council conference in Madrid this weekend, I’ve been researching Voki and Voicethread and uses thereof.

I’ll post my presentation and notes etc after the event, but this particular Voicethread made by Silvia Tolisano aka Langwitches came to mind and I thought I’d share it now as I think it’s genius!

Basically, there are many photos contributed by people from around the world of something that is particular to their country – could be a tradition, a habit, a routine, a custom – in order to promote intercultural dialogue about our similarities and differences. People are invited to contribute – see the whatcoulditmean wiki for details – by uploading photographs and also by surmising what the photos might mean!

A simple idea but great fun and thought provoking too.

El Ogro y la Bruja

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A beautiful story for the end of October – made me go ‘ah!’

Here are the words in case you want them!

Ella era una bruja fatal

su hermosura y su soledad

caminaba en la niebla sin ver

que un ogro muy triste la seguía

Este amigo tarareaba una canción

y la bruja ocultaba su emoción

En los cuentos de hadas

las brujas son malas

y en los cuentos de brujas

las hadas son feas

así decía la canción

que el ogro cantaba

En el bosque,un día de sol

se encontraron frente a frente los dos

le clavó su mirada

la bruja malvada

para ver si podía

con su magia ahúyentarlo

pero el ogro sonríendo y cantando

el hechizo rompió

La tomó de la mano

las lechuzas callaron

se miraron un rato largo

y el ogro y la bruja se amaron

bajo el sol..

No hay mejor brujería que el amor

la la ra lara la la ra larala!!!
La ra la larala laieee!!!

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clothes line, originally uploaded by daniel n. reid.

Having accosted him at the bus stop, I had the pleasure of travelling from Cowes to Newport with Adam Sutcliffe last Friday. Not quite sure why or how the subject arose, but I do know that at some point during the journey I said ‘This weekend I will mainly be wearing red’ as Adam reminded me of it on Saturday evening when I was in my fourth red outfit of the weekend saying ‘you weren’t joking, were you?!’

So, it amused me to read the following article on BBC Mundo:


Más sexy si se viste de rojo.
¿Quiere volver a un hombre loco de amor? Vístase de rojo. O al menos eso fue lo que encontró un estudio científico.

Basically, it suggests that if a woman wears red, she is seen as more attractive and more worth spending money on by men (but not by women!)

I’d just decided I would stick to one colour to save problems of deciding what to wear jewellery and accessory-wise and I’d just bought some lovely clothes in Barcelona. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?? ;o)

¡Vámonos! is 1

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Having congratulated José ‘Así se hace‘ Picardo on the 1st birthday of Box of Tricks yesterday, it dawned on me that it must be ¡Vámonos!’s birthday soon – and then I realised I’d missed it in all the fun and excitement of the IoW conference!

So belatedly, Happy Birthday to my lovely pink blingy blog ;o)

As I explained in my first post on 23rd October last year, I procrastinated and vacilated for a long time before finally taking the plunge and starting a blog. Having said that, I have loved blogging – it suits the chatty, enthusiastic, got to share the news part of me, and also satisfies the part of me that is frustrated by day to day stuff. And it means that I can write which appeals to the part of me that hasn’t seen much action since my Uni of Sheffield days.

Of course, I don’t just blog for my own satisfaction – I hope people find my blog interesting and useful – but I really think I’d carry on even if I didn’t get read. At times this year, I have hidden from reality by blogging and it has kept me going through the hardest and saddest time of my life.

And it has also restored my feeling that I do have something to say that’s worth hearing – sometimes it’s hard when everyone at school tells you that you’re so good but you know that they actually don’t really know if you are or not as they have no idea of how Primary languages or new technologies work. So it’s important to me that my peers – like Jo and Joe and José (and others whose names don’t start with Jo!)- tell me what’s what.

Added to which, without this blog I probably wouldn’t have met and made friends with so many people across the country and world who have enriched my life so much with their advice, thoughts and funny comments.

So to all those who have read ¡Vámonos! over the last year, keep reading and …. xxx

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I’ve had the pleasure this weekend of finally meeting Mark Pentleton. Can’t believe we have never actually met before! Mark is a really busy man so I grabbed the opportunity to find out more about why exactly he is up from before dawn to way after nightfall!

I first heard of Mark when he worked on Partners in Excellence (PiE) in Scotland, a project with the purpose of raising achievement in East Ayrshire by establishing a virtual school with pupils contributing through such things as film making, animation and latterly podcasting. The project involved 29 schools across islands and down to South Ayrshire, a very large geographical area with diverse sizes and types of schools. For some, the project became a case of expanding peer group of pupils in tiny schools by use of VLE to develop a community.

The PiEcast was a way of keeping everyone in touch as well as a learning tool for the particpants. It began as a podcast containing news about events, interviews and news reports to give the community a voice. As time went on, this expanded to include a learning element such as listening material in French, Spanish, German and cultural element. This then led to something else – the Verbcast. This was an intense 10-12 minute nightly podcast for four weeks for 25 young people, looking at French verbs. Having listened to the Verbcast, pupils received a text message each day testing them on what they had learned the previous day; the answer was posted to the website – very interactive! Verbcast used relaxation techniques – feedback was good from pupils and teachers were really pleased with the grasp that pupils had of verbs after participation. (Note to Mark – do it in Spanish please!!)

Radio Lingua Network
Mark saw a gap in the market for beginners Spanish podcasts – Notes in Spanish is good for intermediate. So he started Coffee Break Spanish with Ciara in October 2006; a premium version with access to extra materials was launched in January 2007. Lesson 79 was looking at imperfect subjunctive so it wasn’t all easy peasy!!

Mark then began his quest for world domination as follows:
February 2007 – My Daily Phrase German / Italian
September 2007 – Coffee Break French – on episode 41
October 2007 – One Minute Languages x6 in response to requests for basic phrase podcast – Norwegian, Polish, Luxembourgish, German, Gaelic, Russian – 10 lessons
Another 6 just launched – Mandarin, Catalan, Danish, Japanese, French, Romanian
September 2008 – Show Time Spanish – after first few episodes of preparation got soap opera for show – to be released at end as an entity in its own right
October 2008 – Write back soon – EFL podcast tackling phrasal verbs – emails between students using lots of phrasal verbs that are then explained.
Although he didn’t mention it, I particularly like his idea of a week of podcasts leading up to Valentine’s day last year entitled Love Lingo that taught the language of LUUURVE in Spanish, German, Italian, French and Norwegian!

Podcasting fits our lifestyle – it’s hard to learn from a course that is linked to a text book when you’re driving, walking etc. It’s so much easier to listen alone- and less obvious too!! And that’s why podcasting is so successful!

Mark then shared some future projects for RLN – but I’m not allowed to blog those so you’ll have to wait and see ;o)

So, to the lessons learned:

Learning
Podcasts give-

  • content in the learner’s context
  • ‘secret learning’ – lack of peer pressure
  • massive storage opportunities – 670 hrs in 5 years lang learning/1000 on an iPod
  • access – if it’s there, they might just use it! If it’s not, they don’t have the opportunity!
  • just in time delivery via RSS – time things to happen just before an exam, at a particular time etc
  • learners learn most by making podcasts

Sharing information
Podcasts show that

  • learning not just for pupils
  • podcasting inherently builds community
  • collaboration

Style of delivery
Podcasting should NOT be recording of classes delivered – must be created eg four main points rather than whole lesson
Should they be scripted or non-scripted – most of RLN’s are non scripted

Technical lessons

  • equipment – CO3U Samsung USB mike
  • mic techniques
  • recording
  • systems
  • ‘respecting the ear’ – if people are listening through headphones, avoid crackles!!

I found all this fascinating – I am not going to launch a business empire like Mark – for a start, he’s too good and I wouldn’t stand a chance against that competition. However, the lessons are applicable to all podcasting and podcasters. It also all showed exactly why Mark never seemingly sleeps – he has no time!!

If you’re going to the Language Show this weekend, you can catchup with Mark and the RLN crew yourself on stand 20!

Keep up the good work Mark – and I look forward to the next lot of RLN projects in the pipeline – they sound very exciting – but my lips (and cheeky tweets!) are sealed ;o)

So – for all your language needs – check out RLN – there’s something for everyone!!

One of the highlights of the IoW conference was learning how to podcast on a Mac. Not so much for what I learned as to how I was taught and by whom.

Don’t get me wrong; it was very exciting learning how to use Garageband to podcast and great fun too. But more important to me than that was the fact that the session was delivered by four pupils from Heathfield Technology College with little or no ‘teacher’ input.

The pupils had written the presentation themselves and taught us what they had learned from Shirelands CLC, represented by Lesley Hagger-Vaughan of whom I have heard many great things! They were confident, cogent and very professional in their delivery- first of all , explaining the ‘W’s of podcasting – why/when/what/how/where before demonstrating the whole process of making a podcast and then splitting it into manageable chunks. Each stage was re-demonstrated before we were set off in small groups to try it out. And at all ties, there was a pupil at hand to check we were getting on OK, or to give us extra help if we needed it.

  • A storyboard was produced.
  • We rehearsed using an iPod with a microphone attachment.
  • We recorded using a condenser microphone, splitting the audio into manageable chucks to allow for easier editing. At this point we were encoraged to make sure that we ‘acted’ with our voices and didn’t keep it monotone!
  • Next came editing the audio chunks to eliminate pauses, create space for the intro music and ensure that it was all corectly recorded.
  • Using the ‘Jingles’ option, we added music to the audio, lowering the music so that the voice could be heard over the top of it.
  • Finally we added photographs to illustrate the podcast.
  • (My group even managed to add a Powerpoint slide ours!)


The session concluded with a showcase of the three finished podcasts – all about our visit to the Isle of Wight. I had to rush off to my round table presentation with Jo Rhys-Jones so didn’t get to download our podcast onto my memory stick so I can’t post it here, but it was very good! ;o)

Apparently, it was the first time that these pupils had done such a session but you’d never have known. They delivered clearly, supported one another, answered questions when asked and kept perfectly to their timings – other presenters weren’t so good at that – especially the ones talking about Primary MFL ;o)

And, with the Brummie accents, it was like being at home!

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