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!
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Get a Voki now!

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

AC_Voki_Embed(300,400,”4595c59435702b8b46df7c5bf57098e6″,907101, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

You may have noticed rather a lot of Voki action on ¡Vámonos! today as 6VH and I had an experiment with Voki.com. We’re coming to the end of unit on school and to round it off, we were making up paragraphs about school. As the SIP is highlighting AfL and because I think it’s a valuable way of monitoring, assessing and practising listening and speaking, we’re doing lots of audio recording. Yesterday, 3AT had a go at recording Spanish weather forecasts using Audacity. This morning 5SD were recording information about the solar system in Spanish – they all tried to do it at the same time having discovered that the laptops had in built microphones (cue various raps, football chants and random utterances before they got to work) but this proved to be unsatisfactory so we set up two recording areas outside the classroom and in the cloakroom.

This afternoon, 6VH were supposed to planning their scripts for the first part of the lesson. However, being inquisitive kids, they noticed that I was making sure that Voki worked at school (it does sometimes and not others so have to check there and then!) and before I knew it were on logged on and following what I was doing.

Sadly, the record facility in Voki wasn’t working today, so i had to record in Audacity, export as a .WAV and then use the upload function to make my (introductory) Voki. I uploaded it to my blog as I couldn’t log in either!

Lots of the kids, by the time I played mine back, were well into exploring Voki. They had a good nose around and worked out that they could use the text to speech, and discovered that there are various Spanish voices – male and female – that read your text surprisingly fluently. I was very pleased with their independence.

If only we had experienced more reliable internet connection, less PCs crashing and a less hit-and-miss reaction from the Voki site, then we would have had more than five Voki published on my blog. However, the excitement generated in the class as we published those that did make it was a ray of sunshine after a really bad day.

Next week, we’re going to make more and hopefully use Voicethread too to share our thoughts!

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!

And we’re on a roll here – here’s comes Lauren’s punk rocker!!

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Here’s Ella’s Voki, delivered by Charlie ‘el perro’ :o)

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”70b6c498e6113f8c0535f2a47890e367″,905743, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

As we’re having issues with recording sound directly into Voki, Chris cleverly found that you could type in the text and select a Mexican accent. Here’s his Voki!

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Get a Voki now!

Here’s our first Voki!!

AC_Voki_Embed(200,267,”1bf0b68ee4df6ca51fe0815ca86f4008″,905705, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!

Sagradafamilia, originally uploaded by Theo K.

Bon dia des de Barcelona! Didn´t think I´d get to blog from Barcelona but as ´mi marido´is ´trabajando´and the hotel has a PC with free wifi, ´aquí estoy´.

I am having a lovely time and there´s still more than a day to go.

Yesterday we went to Montjüic and visited MNAC, Fundació Miró and el Poble Espanyol.

Today we´ve visited la Sagrada Familia (I expected scaffolding but there was far too much of it!) and then Parc Güell. And it´s only lunchtime.

Next on the agenda is Port Vell and Port Olimpic before el Barri Gòtic etc and some serious shopping tomorrow.

I´ve taken lots of pictures – typical tourist ;o) – but as ´el marido´is using his laptop and this PC doesn´t Bluetooth or have an SD card reader, I can´t downlaod them at the moment. However, I have ´borrowed´one by the lovely Theo K to illustrate my post!

Fins aviat!

PS I am trying really hard to speak Catalan – after all, that´s why I´ve been revising. However, every time I try I am either looked at blankly or answered in Spanish. So, either I´m trying it out on people who can´t speak Catalan, my Mallorquí accent is confusing them, or I really am rubbish at Catalan! Hoping it´s not the latter ;os

Soooo excited! Tomorrow I’m off to Spain with Mr S (and without the little Master Ss!)

Three nights in Barcelona – definitely not long enough but I’m grateful for any time spent in Spain. And Barcelona – wow! I’ve studied the history of the city at University, learned the language and read books (fact and fiction) about its streets. So can’t wait to be let loose to explore properly – last time I was on an organised trip and had a measly 2 hours to ourselves! Mr S will just have to follow me around and as long as he is allowed to partake of coffee, beer and tapas at regular intervals, he’ll be fine!

Hope to take lots of pictures of my own, but here are a few by other people to set the scene.

And a brilliant 3D movie of how the Sagrada Familia might / will look when it’s finally finished – in 2020!!

I received a missive from the school Bursar last week informing me that I had not spent my budget yet and warning me that if I didn’t get a move on, the remaining balance would be ‘re-allocated.’

Well, faced with the prospect of Art getting more paper and paint that is then locked up so we can’t touch it, or PE getting even more equipment to lose, I set about finding ways to spend, spend, spend.

I am not adverse to shopping and just love a good brochure so it was really a hardship! However, I did resent being forced to spend my money before I’d really been able to decide on the best items on which to spend it for the benefit of the kids. I did toy with the idea of purchasing a fire extinguisher for a certain Scottish Fizzics teacher who is at risk of combustion without one, but then got lost in the pages of the lovely glossy leaflets that I stash away for such occasions.

So, what did I buy?

• borders for displays
• posters for walls all around the school
• a subscription to Babelzone – a bargain at £49 with a wealth of sound files, games, listening activities and more matched to the QCA units.
• stickers
• Spanish syllables and blends pocket charts
• a bingo game
• and various other bits and bobs.

Added to some bilingual books, subscription to Atantôt and set of dictionaries I’d purchased earlier in the year, and the Sónica software that we bought with Tesco vouchers, that’s not bad – and Ive still got another £170 to spend!!

Next on the list –

• more dictionaries and a simple grammar book (working on learner independence this year!)
• some recordable postcards
• an easi-Speak microphone
• a talking photo album
• plasticine (for animating!)
• and I’m tempted by Talk balls (no comments!)

And when the Head gives me the £150 she’s promised owed for cover, I’m going to get Little Tails of the Unexpected too.

So, off to check out more glossy brochures (on and offline!) and make sure that the Bursar is familiar with the details of Linguascope, TTS, Little Linguist, Beelingua, Costcutters and Language Stickers.

Any suggestions as to what else I might buy??