My session at the wonderful Practical Pedagogies conference centred around the use of technology to enhance Primary Language Learning.

Key points I made included:

• technology is not  just for the pupils but also for the teacher;
• it is just one tool we have to use;
• it is not always the best tool for the job.

I went on to suggest online tools as well as apps that might be useful in a range of contexts and situations.

My presentation is below and there is wiki with links to tutorials, examples and ideas that accompanies it. Feel free to ask questions via the contact form or @lisibo on Twitter.

In celebration of the new features of Storybird, I’ve been back to the site and had another play around and written a new book!

I’ve written about Storybird before here, here and here. Oh, and here and here too!

New things on Storybird that I think are particularly useful from an educational point of view –

1. No more Flash so you can use and view the Storybirds on any smartphone or devices including iOS such as iPads and iPod Touch devices. This also means that you can write Storybirds in scripts that do not use Latin characters such as Greek, Mandarin and Arabic.

2. More categories, making it easier to search for a story written by someone else, and also filter for age appropriate stories.

3. New ‘create’ page and new covers.

HOWEVER,  you may now be able to write in other scripts but you still can’t publish them to the PUBLIC gallery, nor can you publish in any language other than English. The Community Guidelines state

‘While we celebrate all cultures and languages, we can not at this time moderate and thus approve Storybirds for the public library that are written in languages other than English. We will be expanding internationally soon, and we will add specific language support as we do. In the meantime, the stories can still be published in your private library and shared with your family and friends.’

Whilst I know that this is a small company and moderation in lots of languages costs money, the MFL Twitterati did offer to help, and I’m sure that offer still stands?! And I wonder what their plans are – the site is now 3 years old. I will tweet and ask. Watch this space!

UPDATE

Here is the Twitter conversation with Storybird! (NB read from bottom up!)

So it seems we have a while yet before we can freely share our Storybirds on the site.

HOWEVER, to get around this, you can embed them into a blog (as I have here), or share the URL of your Storybird (I shared with my own email address then opened the book and copied the URL)

And there is also the wonderful MFL Storybird wiki. Whilst the URL way will still work, the fact that you are now given an embed code means that the books can now be embedded on the page and read there and then rather than having to be transferred to Storybird.com to read!

A shame that you have to “know the right people” to be able to access all these stories in other languages but better than nothing!

La vida sana. on Storybird

Just rediscovered a lovely website for stories in Spanish. La Biblioteca Infantil and La Biblioteca Pre-Escolar are great for native speakers and young learners alike with stories on a variety of themes complete with accompanying activities.

For example, La Pelota Dorada in La Biblioteca Infantil is a story based on a fairytale (won’t give away which one!) in which you can name the princess, the prince and also the hero which you choose from a duck, a beaver or a tortoise. The story has passages of text to read and sections of dialogue that appear in speech bubbles and are read to you.

Accompanying the story is an activity – in this case a ‘Find the difference’ – and also a list of books on a similar theme.

In La Biblioteca Pre-Escolar the stories are more simple and are all read aloud to the reader. In El canto del corral features a little girl who wants to sing but everyone is too busy until he goes into the farmyard. To accompnay the story there is an online activity – choosing musical instruments – and a craft activity as well as a list of books ona similar theme.

There aren’t a huge number of stories, however they are on a variety of themes that are suitable for integration into the primary curriculum, particularly in the  EYFS / PSHE areas.

The site also exists in English so good for comparing language, and also for the less confident Spanish speaker who wants to check out the meaning of the story!

GrowStoryGrow, a story-telling website for learning languages, is holding a story writing competition.

Open to children aged 9-11, the winner will have their story translated into different languages, animated and publish

ed online with their name and school. The story can be written in any language so taking part will benefit general literacy as well as language learning.

The deadline is 30th June 2011 and the winner will be announced on 11th July.

The winning entry will be showcased at the London Language Show.

I had a lovely time with some delegates this morning talking about storytelling using ICT – ‘digital storytelling’

Here’s my presentation – possibly won’t make much sense until it has the sound added, but you’ll have to wait a bit for that until I get the file back from Joe Dale’s iRiver.

Also, there is a document containing all the notes from the session.

Tell me a story session notes

Tell me a story presentation

Links that I missed off the list – MFL animation themed!

Catherine Elliot – www.twitter.com/catherinelliott

http://ssclc.wordpress.com

http://bit.ly/efSmim – Joe Dale interviews Catherine

Oscar Stringer – www.twitter.com/ostringer

http://www.animationforeducation.co.uk/ – go to Film examples – MFL

Any questions or queries, feel free to contact me

Also as part of my presentation at ICT Links into Languages conference I’ll be mentioning ToonDoo so here are a few examples of how it’s been used in MFL.

Mi Vida Loca

Comparisons on Mandarin

In this Spanish story, Charlie and Bon QuiQui go out to lunch.

And some French comic strips on introductions

And a couple of German examples –

Today I’m presenting a session at ICT Links into Languages Conference in Southampton entitled Tell me a story. As part of the session, i’ll be showing delegates how to use Zooburst and have therefore been having a look at some of the books already on the site.
Here are a few examples of how it’s been used in MFL.

A story in French about the consequences of kicking your ball through someone else’s window!

An Italian Zooburst – a recipe!

Another French one here – where are Dracula’s teeth?

A Spanish story about a Prince.

And here’s a variation on the Prince story.

A brilliant Zooburst here packed with information about El reciclaje

And finally, a German ‘story’ of someone’s sporting activities for the week.

Just (re)discovered ZooBurst thanks to Carolyn Jones and her message on the Yahoo MFL resources group giving the LinkBunchURL from TeachMeet Sheffield. It’s something about which I’ve heard before.  And I’ll be investigating further.

ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books.

ZooBurst allows you to write your own stories and animate them as pop up books.  As the pages turn, the characters pop up, and can be made to speak.

As with Storybird, you can search an online gallery of other people’s stories.

Having had a little look, I came across these stories Celebrando el Bicentenario en Chile.