@simonehaughey

On May 6th I made the trip across Birmingham in rush hour traffic to attend TeachMeetWM organised by the irrepressible and absolutely bonkers Simone Haughey at her school Robin Hood Primary. I sadly missed the choir singing and the start of proceedings thanks to a staff meeting and the traffic, but I arrived in the end to be greeted by delicious Chinese food saved for me by Sim and lots of friendly faces including John Rolfe and AnaPaula Booth from the British Council, and the staff of Robin Hood who are obviously well used to Simone as they didn’t bat an eyelid when I asked if they had a couple of hula hoops I could borrow!

There were many great presentations on the night including a couple via video, and you can see what you missed by looking at the Storify of the tweets at the end of the post. However, my presentation is below as promised for those who were there. How I managed to explain it all in 7 minutes I do not know but I avoided being attacked with a cuddly toy! Do leave a comment if you have questions!

Last night was #DevonMFL Teachmeet. Despite being given warning, life took over and my contribution didn’t arrive in time for the night. However, rather than waste it, I decided to share it here!

So, here is my hastily – but not hastily enough – prepared short presentation on using games to learn Spanish in and out of the Primary classroom.

Teachmeet Devon 3.10.13 from lisibo on Vimeo.

I refer to various things in my presentation that may need further explanation – I’ve linked to some below but feel free to ask questions in the Comments if you need clarification.

Toenail game

La vaca Lola

More games etc can be found in this post/presentation called Games to learn and I also spoke at #ililc3 on using games and activities in the language classroom in a presentation entitled Let out for good behaviour!

What I didn’t say (I was trying to keep under 7 minutes!) was that Take Ten en español is brilliant for embedding language into the curriculum, and for supporting the non-specialist teacher! Check it out here! 

As I now live in Switzerland I can’t be at TeachMeet Brum tonight. To assuage my disappointment, I thought I might appear virtually and therefore prepared a little video presentation on Memrise.com, a really great site that I’m using to learn some German, revise the Catalan I learned at university and to play around in Spanish, a language that I speak and teach. It’s not just for learning languages though – you can learn about animals, famous people, general knowledge and, as I show in the video, apples! So, in a nutshell, helps you memorise things! You can add your own lists of words so you can customise it to the needs of your classroom for example and you can access other people’s lists too (could save lots of time!)

I did forget to mention that there is an iPod app being developed – I’m currently one of the people beta testing it as they look to improve it. They are planning an Android app too.

[vimeo 42614325 w=500 h=313]

I couldn’t be at BETT this year which made me sad. I can do without the exhibition in itself; what I missed was the interaction with others and particularly the TeachMeet and TeachMeetTakeovers from which I have learned so much.

Not to be beaten, I recorded a 2 minute nano-presentation in case my name came up on the ‘MagicFruitMachine‘. It didn’t, but all is not lost as a)a list of URLs and links to presentations and blogs was given to every attendee and b)I’ve recorded it so you get it anyway!

Here it is – entitled Be patient – it’ll happen, it’s my encouragement to those who feel that their “drop in the ocean” won’t make a difference.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/34787586 w=400&h=300]

I’m at NCSL in Nottingham at the UK National eTwinning Conference.

This afternoon we’re having a Teachmeet and I’ve decided to share about one idea that has come from our Comenius Regio project and specifically a visit to the zoo.

Here’s the presentation (lots of pics!) and the link to my blogpost that expands on my idea.

Flickr CC by jurvetson

Supporting the ‘less confident‘ is the theme of my 7 minute presentation.

Some ideas I may or may not throw out there!

1. embed sound in presentations

eg El granjero tiene una granja

El pequeño petirrojo final

2. make sound files – and encourage their use

eg BGFL website

3.have ‘expert’ pupils who you train to support

4.point out ways of teaching languages that are less stressful

eg Ideas for support and embedding of language learning by class teachers

calendar

5.use  websites to ‘present’ things

eg Babelzone; LanguageNut; BBC Primary Languages site; Lingo Show; favourite games

As I’m full of cold I may be more random than normal so this is just a guide ;o)

My two minute presentation is about Postcrossing. I have mentioned it before but it’s worth mentioning again as it’s always so popular when I do!

In its simplest terms, you “send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!”

Really easy! Writing a postcard is a short focussed activity that can be done anytime there’s a spare five minutes – even the most reluctant writer can manage a few lines. Pop it in the postbox and off it goes. Then you wait – and you receive a postcard from somewhere in the world! It’s a surprise!

We made an actual display of all the postcards with pins on a world map – but as we have 3 buildings at our school this was a bit ‘exclusive’ so we made a virtual map too on Google Maps.

And the postcards themselves are artefacts that we have used for all sorts of activities to enhance international awareness and ICU. One example is year 6 making fact files based on the cards with famous people from tht country, language, music and so on, plus an impression.

And I LOVE the motto!

Yesterday, as the European eTwinning Ambassadors PDW at National college of School Leadership in Nottingham drew to a close, I took part in what Drew Buddie aka @digitalmaverick entitled ‘a Teachmeet style-y thingy’.

Drew introduced the idea of an ‘unconference’ explaining both TedX and Teachmeet before opening the floor to others to share their 7 minute micro or 2 minute nano presentations.

I was first up – see the next post for my presentation – and later for a video of it (if it’s not too hideous!)

Other presenters were-

Lieven from Flanders who shared his magnificent projects, all documented on his blog. These included repurposing old computer mice, decorating them and then using TuxPaint to animate them (MouseArt), using Pivot to make animations of bubbles (B@llobees) and also to make animated characters @ni & M@te who travelled to other schools and found out about them.

Two things that particularly struck me were firstly when Lieven said he liked ‘making the unexpected valuable’ which struck a chord, and also the use of technology to back up and enhance more traditional methods eg the Kindergarten pupils made bubble pictures with paint and straws, and those pieces of art were used as the background for the Bubble animations.

Next up was Paddy who talked about his eTwinning project Wii will rock you which used the Nintendo Wii as a stimulus.  I enjoyed this presentation as Paddy underlined that it was not all about playing games, but that the games were the starting point for other activities – writing letters, designing CD covers, planning tours with travel plans and money considerations, cooperation with other children, publicity and negotiation.  They also worked on a joint sports day with a school in ireland with some ‘traditional’ sports day activities as well as Wii based ones.

Then Susi Arnott shared about using comic strips and Comic Life, and how the process of looking at comics enhanced the understanding of texts and enhanced literacy skills.  She mentioned Bitstrips which I will be investigating!

Drew used Twitter to ask why people went to Teachmeets- responses included:

‘the range of ideas’

‘a cross subject sharing of ideas’

‘non threatening’ collaborative spirit’

‘celebrating work done in my classroom’

‘meeting like minded colleagues leads to great PLNs’

‘at least 20 ideas for use tomorrow’

‘widens my ideas’

Nick Falk finished up the meet with a nano-presentation on the use of QR codes and QR readers in mobile phones.  Very interesting, and something I need to investigate!

No camel, no fruit machine and no alcohol; but otherwise pretty like a normal TeachMeet! Oh, and no cupcakes.  Sorry @niiloa