The Southampton ICT conference - worth a weekend?

February 2011 Southampton - Linksintolanguages MFL ICT conference - Well, absolutely. For many reasons.

1. Although it was a weekend conference and took away from my home time, as the indefatigable Isabelle Jones says, it was "professional ME time".
2. I met loads of other MFL Twitterers who are a terrific bunch.There is a new phenomenon around when meeting people. First you introduce yourself and then you give your Twitter name and suddenly an extra lightbulb flashes on - "Ohhhh! You're so and so!!!" - it really does add an extra dimension to friendships.
3. Fabulous plenaries, excellent seminars, very good speakers, generous exhibitors and great surroundings. Oh and good food.
4. Plenty of DIFFERENTIATED CPD for all. All seminars were graded for IT skills required - very good to see and I wish more CPD providers would do this.
5. It was serious, thought-provoking, challenging and also fun.
6. Highly motivated teachers are great to learn from and encourage the rest of us not to be shy.

All seminars and Plenary keynote sessions are covered here on Joe Dale's site. Have a look and follow up some leads - they are tremendous and I will certainly try to go again next year and a big thank you to all who organised such a good event.

Controlled Assessment for GCSE

A recent Linksintolanguages meeting brought over 50 concerned teachers out to a meeting at Norton Hill school near Bath to discuss all aspects of the new GCSE controlled assessments. Gosh, we are a worried bunch and real attempts at assessments are not lessening our worries.

Peter Spain MFL Advisor for BANES  spoke in the Plenary and then we broke into Exam board groups.
Discussions covered the how, when, how long and wherefores of the process we deal with now.  We are all struggling with the design of Assessment topics, although I feel we are doing it well. The main angst is caused by the slightly bizarre rulings on management of preparation time - those of you in the middle of Year 10 assessments will know exactly what I mean. Teachers don't like to be rendered incompetent by so much change!

Peter and the team at Norton Hill very kindly put his and other presentations on the BANES wiki - here is the link http://baneslanguages.wikispaces.com/Current+news

The only road to comfort if you are picking up a new class in September is to make sure you understand the importance of teaching the class to build up a bank of useful material as they go along including good paragraphs which you have marked for them. They need to know that everything you cover is important for them but without you betraying what the eventual assessment task will be - "prepare yourself for something you don't know about yet "   - it feels very odd but it's the only way to do it.
Our stronger pupils will cope as they always do but I feel that the new GCSE will make life on the C/D borderline very much harder and lower ability pupils are not coping at all. Do you agree?