British Council – ¡Vámonos!
 

Tag: British Council

I was really pleased to be asked to present at the annual Association for Language Learning national conference, Language World. This year it was held in Kenilworth with the title Languages – a unique ingredient of learning. There were several threads running through the weekend including parental engagement, AI, transition and international partnerships. It was on that latter topic that my presentation focussed.

My talk was on Saturday afternoon, and over the preceding 36 hours I attended several presentations that celebrated and promoted international links including one by Jane Harvey and Richard Tallaron of LFEE entitled International projects in schools? Yes we can! as well as a session delivered by Almudena Martinez entitled Celebrating multilingualism – supporting home and community languages. In addition, conversations with exhibitors and other delegates meant that I was adding to my presentation until the last moment and ended up with too much to say in the given time. Therefore, as well as uploading my slides, I’ve made a recording of my presentation (click the image.) All the links in the PDF are clickable but I’ve added a few key ones below.

Lisa Stevens – Promoting International links – a practical guide PDF

Here are some key links:
British Council video
British Council Partner Finder
Global Schools Alliance
UK -German Connection (partnerships) Survey I mentioned is here
LFEE
GSA Student Council
International School Award
Global School Award
Turing funding
Taith (For Wales)
Languages in Primary Schools FB group
Last year’s presentation

Please feel free to ask questions in the comments below, in the comments on the video, via email or on social media. And if you attend the GSA 5th birthday event in Liverpool, please say hello!

Thanks for the sketchnote Clare

If you read my post a few weeks ago about my recent presentations, you may be interested in an article I wrote for the Global School Alliance.

In it, I wrote about the international journey of Whitehouse Common Primary and why it has been so important. Click the link below the image to read it.

While you’re there, why not have a look at the other posts from schools around the world, sharing their projects and the impact it has had on their school communities. It’s free to join the Global School Alliance and there are many interesting opportunities to be found on their platform.



image shows 5 coloured people icons standing behind a clipboard with the word survey on it and a green tick.

Last night I attended a webinar hosted by ALL London with the British Council to launch the Language Trends survey for 2021.

Language Trends is a yearly report that discusses the state of language learning in England and is written by Ian Collen of Queens University, Belfast. It’s a really important report on language learning at primary and secondary level in England that is published and read at high level by government and policy makers. The more responses they get, the better the picture of language learning across the country as it is informed by the results of a survey sent to schools.

British Council written in dark blue capital letters to the right of four turquoise dots in a square.

The Language Trends survey 2021 is being emailed to schools this week. It’ll be sent to the public email of your school – often the HT or enquiry@ Last year, it was notable that the responses tended to come from schools in more ‘affluent’ areas statistics wise (eg lower than average FSM) so it would be good to have a wider breadth of data this time. Ian Collen, the author of the report, wants to hear all about what’s going on in primary schools. One of last year’s finding was that “Primary Languages are embedded in policy but not in practice.” Therefore, if you ARE putting policy into practice, this is an opportunity to share all the wonderful things that are going on.

If you are asked to fill it in, please do! If you aren’t, email the Head and ask them to do it, or offer to do it for them! It’ll take you about 15 minutes. The deadline is 29th January which is very soon!!

If you’d like to read last year’s report, you can find it (and other research into language learning in the UK) on the British Council website Language Trends 2020 or it’s below in PDF,

british-council-logo-2-color-2-page-001-hrAn exciting opportunity for anyone whose primary school teaches Spanish.

If you’re interested, please respond to Vicky Gough at the address below.

 Support for Spanish in your primary school!

The British Council has lots of positive experience in delivering language lessons to pupils remotely. We are planning to pilot a programme that would enable schools to have a native speaker teacher live from one of our teaching centres in Argentina for one or two sessions a week to support the school in the teaching of Spanish.

For this pilot we are looking for two or three primary schools, preferably at different stages in their development of languages at primary level, to help us develop this offer for schools in the UK. This is likely to involve one or two weekly sessions for a 5 or 6 week period in the Spring term.

If you are interested and can meet the requirements below, please send an email to vicky.gough@britishcouncil.org by December 14, giving details about how Spanish is taught in your school.

Technical requirements:
· Videoconferencing equipment which works on H323 or SIP protocol and can connect with external equipment via a SIP or public IP address
· Videoconferencing equipment must be connected to a projector or display that is big enough for the whole class to see
· 2MB dedicated upload/download speed, preferably on a fibre optic dedicated connection

Other requirements
· Support of the Head teacher
· A teacher who can be present in the classroom during sessions (either a Spanish teacher or the class teacher)
· Spanish teacher/class teacher to be available for a 20-minute weekly coordination meeting outside the regular session/s
· A school representative to attend a planning meeting at the start of the pilot and an evaluation meeting at the close

britishcouncilBritish Council Ambassadors from across the UK assembled in Manchester this weekend to meet one another and find out more about British Council projects, strategies and plans. Starting on Friday lunchtime and finishing today at midday, the conference was ‘all go’ with early starts (first session at 8.30am on a Saturday?) and a timetable that was stretched as time passed all too fast.

I decided to continue my sketch note journey and bought a new notebook on the way to the station, one that stays open on its own (spiral bound) and is slightly larger – and square which seemed to help!

Below are my sketchnotes and links to important /useful sites from the conference. I’m sorry that I had to leave early and missed the final sessions. I’ll catch up when the final presentations are shared!

Opening session (Emma Chaplin) plus quotations from the conference.

Opening session (Emma Chaplin) plus quotations from the conference.

Dr Mark Potts - Living out our values

Dr Mark Potts – Living out our values

Update on SchoolsOnline: how it works (John McMurtrie) and what it offers and will offer - exciting stuff! (Vicky Gough)

Update on SchoolsOnline: how it works (John McMurtrie) and what it offers and will offer – exciting stuff! (Vicky Gough)

British Council Strategy presented by Stephen Hull

British Council Strategy presented by Stephen Hull

Katherine Walakira - Connecting Classrooms Professional Development offerings

Connecting Classrooms Professional Development offerings shared by Katherine Walakira

International School Award - Ludmila Vávrová (and John Rolfe!)

International School Award – Ludmila Vávrová (and John Rolfe!)

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Funding for three more years of Connecting Classrooms; Stephen Hull shares plans to spend it!

Gary Shiells and Ana Paula Booth talk eTwinning as it celebrates its 10th birthday!

Gary Shiells and Ana Paula Booth talk eTwinning as it celebrates its 10th birthday!

Dorota Drajewicz and Bethan Dinning - Erasmus+ opportunities for schools

Dorota Drajewicz and Bethan Dinning – Erasmus+ opportunities for schools

SchoolsOnline

Global Learning Programme

Barefoot Billion

 

I’ve Storify-ed the tweets with the conference hashtag #BCAmb15 too.

And finally, as part of the programme I delivered a workshop on Twitter. You can access the presentation here –  twitter manchester

And here’s the eTwinning guide I mentioned 

I’ve just received an email from the British Council Schools Online sharing these two resources (as well as mentioning the benefits of hosting/sharing a native language assistant) for primary language learning.

Our free Sharing lives, sharing languages activity packs are aimed at children aged 7-11 who are new to learning languages. They can be used in the classroom or with your partner school.

Encourage your pupils to greet one another in a different language with our Hello Everyone!activity pack

We heard it in the playground activity pack introduces children to numbers one to six in a different language through the context of playground games.

The activities are very simple and there plans are mostly language agnostic so you can decide on the language to be used dependent on skills or the language of a partner school. I’ll be suggesting to staff at WCPS that they use these activities as part of our whole school project through eLanguages in which each class has a different country on which to focus in the lead up to the World Cup finals in June.

I particularly like the playground games idea. Why not look at sites like  Traditional children’s games from around the world or this site that shares German games or this blog post or this one too. You might find some ideas in this PDF or on TES resources or Streetplay you’re looking for Spanish ideas. And what about these 3 programmes from BBC School Radio with dance based on playground games from around the world?

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