Modern Languages Blog

A Spanish course for youngsters is set to return to a Lothians football club due to popular demand.

Read the full story on the Scotsman website.

More students are taking up “hard to recruit” subjects at Edinburgh University than in the past five years, according to new education figures released yesterday. They show encouraging rises at Edinburgh in subjects such as engineering and European languages - courses which had previously been among those that tended to be under-subscribed.

Read the full article on the Scotsman website. 

Hundreds of road signs are being replaced in Cornwall with dual English and Cornish language versions.

The Kerrier District Council policy to replace old or missing signs is being coupled with a new move to see where the Cornish language can also be used.

Read the full article on the BBC website.

From my continuing live blog of the eTwinning annual conference…

Teachers’ main error with animation is that they, or the kids, start out with an idea that is too complex to achieve. If it’s too complex it will defeat you. Here are some simple ideas for animation:

• How tos: How to make a mummy (useful afterwards as a teaching tool for younger students)
• Animate objects: A love story about two pairs of shoes.
• Tell a story everyone knows
• Don’t feel you need language: animation is a way to avoid the need for the spoken word since the images can say it all.

In today’s animation workshop ICanAnimate is going to be used to create some claymation (stop motion animation). Another pay-for tool is StopMotionPro. One tool I didn’t know about is the Open Source SMAnimator, a free to use application that works well, even has the ‘onion-skinning’ that you need to see where your character was in the last frame in relation to where he was in the previous one. There’s also MonkeyJam.

The workshop intro and some more of Oscar can be seen on the videos on his website.

Some animation tips:

• Pauses: in music, silence is important. In Dance, stillness is important. In animation we need pauses before action to accentuate the action that’s about to happen.
• Animating multiple features: animating every feature of a model (eyes, arms, feet…) makes the character look ‘fast and furious’, jumpy. Limit the kids’ concentration to animating one thing at a time.
• Blinks and winks: remove eyes, and pop them back on after three frames.
• Planning: Oscar’s leaving some big pauses (he’s just left 18 frames for a special effect he’ll add later). This is because he knows what’s coming up. Planning is vital to knowing what you’re doing, but the collaboration that takes place on the hoof is just as important. Let the kids alter the detail of the story - it’s fun.
• Instant gratification: Look back at what you’ve done regularly. Give the kids the instant gratification and the time to peer review, criticise and change things if they are not happy - let them get it the way they want it. Actually - get out of their way
• Keep models simple: bold design with not too much detail - let the camera have a focus of attention.
• Add visuals before adding sound effects: it’s easier
• Keep transitions simple: advise the kids to keep transitions to a simple minimum. They tell the viewer when the beginning and end of a scene are taking place. That’s all.
• Animation is 60% sound: Sound effects and voices are not the ‘icing on the cake’. They make the film, they bring it to life. You can get some nice sound effects from FindSounds.com
• Share it: Use the bluetooth on your Mac (or PC Bluetooth adaptor) to send the finished film to one student who can then send it to others around the class. Give them ownership of their own film.
• Advert-length films: Keep films to that length - somebody’s got to watch that film in the end
• Visual representations of emotions: much more fun than words

School:
Don’t talk to anyone while you work. Don’t copy the work of those who’ve done the same thing before you. Make sure you have all the stuff you need to know in your head.

Business or Work:
Talk to everyone, try to copy what they do and build on it, know how to find out the information you need. Be ingenious!
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Teachers reaching the end of their careers are often those who are most excited about the changes and opportunities in education. Is this because they are finally being released of the shackles of conformity that they have had their whole career? Is there a way to liberate teachers from this before they reach 60?
____

Some people think technology is just about doing what we do already quicker, neater or with more colour. It’s more useful to think about learning in terms of what we can do now that we couldn’t do before thanks to technology, building, space, more thinking.
____

Vocabulary is a heck of a barrier to making changes : ‘Not School‘ had huge effects on the performance of kids because the learning wasn’t learning. Learners were researchers.

From my eTwinning conference liveblog we see that Heppell’s hypercarding again, and hitting the nerve where it matters.

School buildings, timetables where one subject is studied for a month at a time, libraries made from honeycomb, air-filled balloons to give privacy to learners, people taking risks because they realise that the riskiest thing they can do is do what we did last century.

• 1997: We built BIG things to DO things for OTHERS
  We had national curriculums, central control. We deliver curriculum, we deliver stuff.
• 2007: We build THINGS to help PEOPLE to HELP EACH OTHER
  The Creative Archive, eBay, YouTube. We communicate, we mentor, we twin up, we help, we don’t want content, we want to interact.

Some phenomena - do they matter?

• 
  YouTube: A 12 year old can be world champion cup stacker. Everyone’s excited in the video, except for the mum Kids are still keen to be the best, they are proud of their excellence and want to share it, they can share it, and schools’ attempts to limit this power are, at best, futile.
• YouTube: CMTV is YouTubed podcast video from a school. It’s simple, it’s effective, the whole school watch it, a third of parents watch it. It’s better than assembly, so much so that they don’t do assemblies any more. It’s produced by kids for kids.
• TeachersTV: A content producer, creating programmes to help teachers to do their jobs better. One of the biggest growth sectors in its audience? Kids. They watch it, they want to learn what it could be like to be taught in a particular way.
• Mobiles: China in 2002 had 200,000 phones. In 2007 China adds 200,000 more phones daily.
• Homemade video: 60-second videos are celebrated at international cinema events, like Bafta.
• Knowledge and content don’t matter: Why do PC World sell Encyclopedia Brittania for 99pence? Who knows? Knowledge is free on the web so knowledge can’t and shouldn’t be sold. It’s what is done with knowledge that’s worth money. [Ewan - Do we teach our kids to 'do stuff' with their knowledge?]
• Buy Essays Online vs Free Essays Online - which one wins a GoogleFight?
  Could we not start asking our students to critique others’ essays and give their reasons for grading them themselves as students?

School buildings

• Toilets in back of every classroom: kids need to drink water to concentrate, kids need the toilet, kids need a toilet near the place of learning. Performance of kids who drink more water rises 15-20%
• Classrooms designed by students, architected by students and with no ‘front’, just a wide length-long door open to the grass outside.

Education 2.0 - Education 1.0
We can’t expect schools do meet the kind of targets being set by copying the tactics of those reaching them already. Every school is different. Teachers need to be empowered to go and research what will work for their culture. That means they will discover new things.

After all, we wouldn’t go to the dentists and wish it was “like it was when I was a wean”.

Why should we not measure the happiness of children as they leave school? Has the process contributed to their happiness, their enrichment, beyond academic results? We need a learnometer.

Education 2.0 is really something that should feel very comfortable for most people, like Learning 1.0. It’s maybe just that some have forgotten the excitement you can feel when you’re learning rather than being taught.

From the eTwinning conference in Brussels comes news of a joint blog project between two primary schools in Ireland and Malta.

Once Upon A Blog also hosts audio files made by both schools.

What is believed to be the first bilingual newspaper in Scotland has been launched for the Highlands’ growing Polish community. The free Gazeta z Highland has been published by Golspie-based weekly the Northern Times.

Read this story on the BBC website.