Inspiring work - calligrammes

Last month my friend Marie France Perkins sent a tweet out about the lovely work done by her pupils on the 1st World War - if you don't use Twitter then you may be missing some of the amazing sharing that takes place on a regular basis. Marie France runs her blog called Sans problèmes for promoting French and show-casing her pupils' work. In March she posted some fabulous calligrams - picture poems in the style of Apollinaire - and a terrific link for a french site showing Art from the WW1 trenches - very moving stuff and MF's pupils have produced some great work - thanks for sharing with us. It has reminded me of this lovely way of recycling vocabulary - word pictures for all sorts of lexical areas.
I like the site for English teachers too for writing shape poems - there is a lot that we can adapt very quickly for MFL. This week I have challenged my Year 9s to make their own calligrammes in the style of Apollinaire or to substitute their own ideas into his poem Automne - I'll post the results when I mark their work with any luck!

ALL West of England Branch conference Saturday 6 March 2010

Teachers are real gluttons for punishment, tipping out on a Saturday morning for CPD, but it was a great morning and lovely to see new faces and stalwart ALL committee members still carrying the flag for MFL.

Key Note address was given by Wendy Adeniji, consultant, teacher, "Regional Co-ordinator for dissemination of the New Modern languages Secondary Curriculum," general MFL mover and shaker.
Wendy knows the importance of being a realist and that was a most welcome introduction to the day. Any speaker tackling the renewed KS3 Framework has to be brave enough to take on the grumpy and over-worked like me and I enjoyed Wendy's Keynote speech very much.

Wendy focused on effective KS2-3 transition, aiming to provide coherence and progression, all with a dash of her key theme - "Teaching the usual in an unusual way " - the strap line from one of her websites, link here.

Main points of the new Framework were most helpfully summarised for us and we came away with simple ideas to integrate into SOWs straightaway and some publicity for ilanguages' really good SOW for the whole of Yr7 - I have sent for one of Wendy's sample CDs to try out a few lessons.

Wendy gave us a quick review of her take on covering new KS3 Framework in unusual ways.

1. Using songs for Linguistic progression - teach the grammar for finding je forms from the infinitive - Wendy used Lorie, Abba for -er or ir verb endings and Henri Dès' Polysong for teaching sound/spelling link.
2. Lovely idea for Vokis - get the year 7s to record who they are but then add the twist of saying j'ai les cheveux bruns mais je voudrais les cheveux raides et blonds. - Neat.
3. Wednesday is Wendy's midweek challenge day - She showed us some superb work on Fairtrade ideas with yr7 using Ethletic Fairtrade footballs - take a look at jeujouethique.com website and eco-sapiens.com. Wendy and her co-writers have used the ethical idea to give Year 7 work on sports a novel tweek. Her material was superb.
4. As Thinking skills are so highly promoted in the renewed framework, Wendy reminded us of "Thinking through MFL" by Sheryl Mackay & Mei Lin and demonstrated some materials which test pupils ability to identify facts from opinions for example. Unit 11 of the renewed Framework was brought to our attention again - I really appreciate the push to engage with the material!
5. Using the web to flash up front covers of teen mags in French or German etc will test ability to read and decipher meaning fast. Try "Jeune et jolie" for French or "Mädchen" for German. Realia has never been so accessible.
6. Exploiting poems for reading and creative writing.
7. Intercultural Understanding is of course now a huge part of KS2 and KS3 work but if you lack the resources or inspiration, then look no further than Wendy's ready-made materials. Stunning use of pictures of families' food for discussion, comparison and sobering reflection - how much do they get to eat in Togo etc?? I also loved the use of Amadou and Mariam's hit "Quelle heure est-il à Bamako" and video clips about Fast foods in Senegal - all for Year 7!
8. KAL - Knowledge about Language. Wendy and her co-authors have put in a lot of language awareness materials at the start of their Yr7 SOW, some of it based on Latin for example and also on the 100 most important words in English, French, whatever - I was very impressed by the snippets she showed us and felt inspired to investigate further.

Altogether a great opening to a day of learning and I have been reading Wendy's sites since, gleaning ideas and materials for next year. Her stand-alone modules on Chocolate, Fairtrade, Art for example are going to be life-savers...

MYLO - looking forward

It was with some curiosity that I arrived at CILT in February, not knowing quite what was waiting for us at an initial meeting - still, imagine, what a treat! A whole day out in the big smoke to join other interested ICT-minded teachers to discuss a new project - cool!

You try to do your homework, don't you, but as a product still in development it had been quite hard to get a feel for MYLO in advance. I therefore found myself taken aback by the enormity of the project and really excited by the scale of the assistance that it appears will be on offer to us. As a recommendation of the Dearing review, there is no doubt that the MYLO team's intention is to provide exciting resources for instant appeal in the classroom. This package is being designed to give MFL teachers resources in 4 languages for use at Breakthrough and Preliminary level but with an really modern , relevant feel.
After some more background about the product we were given a chance to play with some of the "challenges" already on offer and then to inspect some further materials and to feed back our initial reactions.
You can read the description of the Challenges designed by the team here. It involves introduction, practice, input and then production but cunningly disguised in interesting scenarios, set in a context with cultural relevance for the language. The pupils are then ready for a challenge, where they will also be led through training materials, but will be able to compete against the computer or friends in a group or against another registered school!

I found it heartening to see the thoughtfulness and care taken by the two guys representing Lightbox Education - they were incredibly open to feedback and criticisms in a way which I think is rare to find.

I couldn't start to write in full about the scope of the project and others have already done it far better than me - see Isabelle Jones, Simon Howells and Chris Fuller for example. However, as a Head of Languages in a good comprehensive school, not a Languages College, I felt able to say whatever I liked to the designers and I felt we were listened to. It looks good - trendy materials, excellent writers, lovely ideas to allow pupils to compete against each other and other schools and I won't be sniffing at this quality of stuff being offered free to us as a result of the Dearing review. We need all the support we can get.

My only reservation - and I told them this - is that life at the whiteboard is now so complex, there is a real danger that the average teacher will sigh from overload, even when presented with superb free materials, because no-one can work out how to pay for or provide training time. We are desperate for time and peace and quiet (in my case) to get to grips with all the new stuff.

That being said, I am going to enjoy trialling the materials - we have only one slot in 3 different computer rooms once every few weeks for all our lower school classes - that is life in an ordinary comprehensive i.e. I will be able to give the MYLO site a very "normal" user try-out - nothing fancy, just the usual range of Year9s becoming more difficult to motivate at this time of year! But I am looking forward to giving it a go and will be writing about it again.

BETT show 2010 for a beginner!

January saw much excitement in the MFL world as BETT show 2010 got under way in Olympia, London. Like many full time-teachers, I was reluctant to ask for too many days out - won't be allowed to go, hit too many exam classes etc - the usual problems - and yet it was frustrating as I noted all the tremendous talks, Teachmeets and seminars happening during school time.
I compromised and decided to make my way to Olympia for the first time on the Saturday to catch what i could catch. I had been warned - it's not for the faint-hearted, already-exhausted or vague! Was I glad of every scrap of preparation I had tried to do!! It's enormous, overwhelming and very intriguing, then you find yourself gradually getting into the atmosphere, heading purposefully from stand to seminar room in a flurry of enthusiastic activity, in order to feel that you have gained. Gained what? Sore feet? Certainly!
But I gained much - in 6 hours,I visited Taskmagic, 2Simple,TTS group, Harcourt/Heinemann publishers to see demos of new materials, saw a 3D demo,talked to Sanako, Coomber, European parliament, MYLO,various exam boards,Televic, E-twinning at the British Council stand, Eurotalk for some bargains in site licences, and met with some MFL twitterati for coffee.
However I also took in two presentations
1.Sheffield West City Learning Centre on blogging to Promote Reflective Learners
How they created effective blogs for pupils with all the work that it entails, how it works as a technique for enhancing interest in learning; main finding - teachers need to keep at the responses on the blog in order to keep the interest going. Without feedback, the blog dies...
2. The redoutable Helen Myers (Ashcombe School) on "How to make ICT work for you in Language Teaching" - a most thorough overview of every aspect of IT in MFL teaching today. I'll see if I could post a link to her handout - a phenomenal gathering of all useful websites, CD ROMs, applications, every imaginable use of IT in MFL. Great.

Overall I had a tremendous day but when reading others blog posts,I missed out big time through not being able to get to the Teachmeet gathering of MFL teachers on Friday evening. I agree with many comments on the difficulty of being an ordinary teacher with no mega budget to spend at BETT but still found it very useful and would love to be better organised next year and see more presentations on one school day perhaps. The more that can be done to maximise the sharing of expertise at the same time as presenting new enticing software or hardware, the better. I look forward to BETT 2011!

Getting started

To blog or not to blog, that is the question! So many bloggers, so many excellent blogs, such a growing field. But there is so much to think about and MFL has never known such pressure; I think there are language matters to discuss and language does matter and we need to keep representing the professionals in schools who regularly get in the classroom and do the hard graft.

I have had such a tremendous year and a half since I first went on Joe Dale's excellent Isle of Wight ICT training course. So many terrific practitioners gathered in Nodehill to learn and share together and I was blown away. Part of it is simply the fear of being left behind - let's be honest. I am in my final decade of teaching, I am a digital tourist, as they say but I am not going lightly into that dark age of retirement! The CPD which I have found for myself, largely through the terrific ICT-loving community of MFL teachers out there in the ether, has been invaluable and has given me a renewed passion for the job of teaching day to day.

I am worried by the time this blog may need, concerned by the "going public"- but I am equally scared of the responsibility that teachers in Britain are forced to carry for the apparent popularity (or lack of it)of their subject and if any of us can do something which will encourage others in our field, then I think we should go for it.

In this blog I'll aim to fill in the gap between those who are expert and those who like me , are just beginning and feeling their way in the digital realm. It IS a journey worth making - it's not even a question of age, is it? Teachers of all ages need to keep fresh, upgrade their skills and buy in a new range of tools to do the job better.

It's just that the IT tools are spectacularly engaging and I may try to illustrate some of them, ask others to help me out and point the way to interesting places if I possibly can.