Modern Languages Blog

Chris Gallacher from the British Council talked about eLanguages and the capacity to make links and share information and resources.

The eLanguages website allows you to host your own section, see your partner’s information, learn about ICT and learn another language and culture.

You can explore a model project, find out more about why teachers are engaging readily with eLanguages, and sign up as soon as you’re ready.

It should help you on your way to getting your International School Award.

eTwinning is popular in Scotland - one delegate at Communicate.08 is an ambassador for eTwinning and is reponsible for teaching French to the whole of Bute.

Range and choice of languages

Don’t think that your links are restricted only to European languages. Learning and Teaching Scotland and Hanban are working together to forge links between Scotland and China. The Confucius Institute for Scotland is a national centre to promote economic, educational and cultural ties between Scotland and China. Structured as a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and Fudan University in Shanghai, the Institute was officially opened by First Minister, Alex Salmond, in autumn 2007.

Robert McKinstry closed by saying that the world is becoming a more dangerous place and we can’t always send pupils abroad - we can use ICT to meet some of our aims of linking pupils globally.

Find out more

You can read more about making links abroad on the MFLE. Or visit our International Education website.

Speaker - Stephen McCrossan, North Lanarkshire Council

What this workshop’s about

North Lanarkshire schools have established strong links with schools in Mallorca. Stephen will outline how videoconferencing has strengthened these links and enhanced the learning experience of the pupils. He will demonstrate the features of the Marratech videoconferencing software and describe examples of its use in the teaching of MFL. There will also be an opportunity for some hands-on experience of using the Marratech videoconferencing software.

The workshop

Stephen went through a couple of projects he’s been involved with at local authority level.

Schools involved in North Lanarkshire were St Margaret’s Secondary School and associated primary schools such as St Dominic’s, St Edward’s. They linked with some schools in Mallorca.

NL has a history of linking with Mallorca. Initially there were teacher visits and pupils sending letters, but now the projects use videoconferencing.

Project goals

Enhancing teachers’ skills - ICT and linguistic skills. Stephen would go out and visit schools to train in ICT, but the main source of support was self-help groups and support groups which were already well established. Lots of telephone support to the Spanish schools, too, to explain how to use the kit. One ICT officer even got sent to Mallorca to train the schools in kit use…

Collaboration and sharing - This was easier for the primary schools as they had their own cluster as well as the Spanish schools.

Improving pupils’ language skills - Stephen will show video

Cultural exchange - they wanetd to show the Spanish pupils what life in Scotland was like.

Improving pupils’ social learning skills - self-assessment and evaluation

About Stephen McCrossan

Stephen McCrossan has taught computing for 15 years, and managed at faculty and departmental level for 12 years. Stephen is currently on a secondment as an ICT Development Officer (Secondary) in North Lanarkshire Council.

Project planning

Had to take a different perspective on the planning of this project. Stephen had to look at a number of influences for their Community of Practice to evolve.

What is a Community of Practice? A group of people who share a passion or interest and learn how to interact as they do their project.

Questions they had to ask about their community, its domain and its practice

• What do we hope to gain?
• What will we learn from each other?
• What do we value?
• Who do we include?
• Who will take the lead roles? (co-ordinator, expert, librarian, for example)
• What sort of knowledge will we use, share and document?

Organisational issues also had to be addressed.

Process

Schools contacted Spain on a fortnightly basis. Teachers, however, contacted each other more often to plan lessons, resources and topics.

Curriculum context

Secondary - S3/S4 & Primary 5-14

Technology

Software used was Marratech videoconferencing software, which wil be available in the Glow environment.

Hardware used was webcams and headphones.

How-to guides used were - a starter guide to videoconferencing produced by Stephen and a technical help sheet produced by the pupils, with key requests and commands in Spanish - e.g. “Could you please turn your mic up?”.

Evaluations

Evaluations were learning-focused, not superficial. It was key that the pupils took responsibility for their own learning. They were asked to:

• think about learning
• the learning environment
• the tasks set
• interest and resources
• favourite/least favourite parts of the lesson

Looking at Marratech

Firstly, Stephen explained that you can download Marratech for the Mac or PC.

Public or private rooms are available - the private rooms you can choose to give people access to.

3 ways of communicating - video, text, voice.

1. Video - Stephen showed his own live talk in the top right of the screen.
2. Text - Stephen showed on the bottom right of the screen how easy it was to chat to someone.
3. Voice - use your own desk mic.

(Not surprisingly, pupils are drawn instantly to text.)

But Marratech has more of an educational slant than other VC software might have - there’s an inbuilt shared whiteboard, for example.

Some ideas to use on your whiteboard

Stephen demonstrated a “reveal/labelling” activity and a sorting activity for the whiteboard. These can all be shared with your partner school(s). He also took a image of himself from the video and labelled “les yeux”.

Importing files - Word, PDF, PowerPoint - onto the whiteboard can also be done easily.

Practical demo

Stephen then asked the delegates to try out Marratech on the Macs supplied. They went to the Paris public rooms and turned their cameras on. There were lots of laughs as people saw themselves appearing…

Normally there would be a lead participant - who would volunteer to say something first?!

Delegates tried out the mics and headphones but we concluded there might not be enough bandwidth for everyone to have this facility on a wireless connection. So just one or two people tried it out and we could hear each other then. Most VC will be done in a hard-wired environment, it is expected.

The videoconferencing can be recorded - great for best practice, HMIE.

How do you set up a room?

Anyone who is an administrator can set up a room. Anyone not playing the game can also be kicked out of the room.

You can send someone the url of a meeting room and, if they don’t have Marractech already, it will download it for them and take them straight to the meeting room.

Private conversations

You can set up a private conversation with another person - and your icon changes from “mic” to “phone”. Remember to take this off again once the private part of the meeting has finished!

Numbers of seats

NL Council has bought 20 seats, so no more than 20 people at once can use the council-licenced Marratech at once. This  number may increase in future.

Further information

Read more on the SQA website about these innovative projects.

Read about videoconferencing in the Advanced Higher class on our ICT in Education website.

Presenter - Wendy Adeniji, freelance ICT trainer and consultant, Bradford

What this workshop’s about

Wendy looks at how we can move away from ‘Death by Powerpoint’ and use the interactive whiteboard effectively to encourage use of the target language, to teach and reinforce grammar and to create activities that motivate pupils.

The workshop

Wendy is from Yorkshire and worked in one of the first schools to use a Promethean board. Initial attempts often resulted in software crashes or upside-down presentations…. Over the years she has developed some techniques and ideas which she shares in training sessions. Teachers ask Wendy to come and show them how to use an IWB so the boards do not become “expensive wallpaper”…

The majority of people in the room use either SMART or Promethean boards.

NB - The workshop focuses on the use of SMART. Promethean boards do not have exactly the same features so do check your own board.

Using PowerPoint effectively

PowerPoint with sound

Wendy showed a Flashcard of a dog with embedded barking sounds. What’s the value added? She can practise “le chien” and bring the word on after the picture of the dog. It’s important for the children to see the word, hear the “ch” sound. Other animals and sounds can be used - “le lapin”, “la souris”, etc. Text can be colour-coded according to gender - red for feminine, blue for masculine. This is great for visual learners and embedding the memory of word genders. It’s a great activity to use in primary languages especially. She often doesn’t say why the word is red/blue - and lets someone ask.

We saw a trailer for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in French - featuring the song by the Oompa Loompas. Then there was a multi-choice question based on the trailer - “How does Willy Wonka describe chewing gum?” (”Vulgaire”!)

Using visuals

Use Google images, video, YouTube (she has a way of getting round blocks on YouTube - go to Real Player and download version 11 of Real Player. It takes about half an hour. Then you can download videos to your own pen drives.) to explain concepts which are difficult to explain without visuals.

“Flash once” activity

Using the animals from before, Wendy lets one of them appear - after first asking the class which one they think will appear. This is a good technique to have the class sitting quietly as they anticipate the quick appearance of an animal.

Beat the image

In the style of the conveyor belt on a famous game show, you can have images floating across the screen and pupils have to remember which objects they’ve seen.

Prediction game

A football will be kicked towards one of six coloured squares - pupils have to guess which one.

Fairy tale - e.g. Boucles d’Ors et les trois Ours

The three bears appear with blank speech bubbles and Wendy asks what the characters are saying. The pupils can write in the speech bubbles and then the audio can play to show whether they were correct - e.g. “Salut - je suis Papa Ours.”

“Slow reveal” activity

Wendy shows part of a picture and asks, in Spanish, what it is, what colour it is and where we are (cheese/apples/meatballs; white/green etc; a cafe/kitchen). Tapas are good to use as pupils know about it. Pupils can label the dishes - either with their own writing or converting it into type. (NB - Wendy would never write large amounts of text on the board - she’d have a slide pre-prepared. You can have an extra board next to you containing any presentation material.)

Beat the computer

Using the animals again, pupils have 6 seconds to guess each animal as they flash up (she has first removed the names of the animals). Wendy would walk round the class listening to responses.

Relating to young people’s culture

Wendy showed a picture of the Fast Show’s Vicky Pollard with a speech bubble. The pupils have to work out what she’s saying. The photo instantly attracts the class’s attention. Pupils can then describe her bedroom in the target language. They can then look at a picture of the bedroom on the board and label objects.

Using stories

Wendy uses these as a way to illustrate grammatical points - eg. the Three Little Pigs can show how to use “du” “de la” and “des”. Don’t worry about the “childish” nature of the story - pupils don’t mind this; in fact they quite like remembering the story from their past.

Using the IWB software effectively

The spotlight tool

You can put a spotlight on your picture, which covers up the whole picture except a hole in the middle. You can move it about and increase or decrease the size. It’s useful for studying parts of the body.

Rub out to reveal

One way to use this is to have characters, e.g. Asterix and Obelix, with blank speech bubbles. The class guesses what they might be saying. Your “rub out” tool then rubs out the blank bubble to reveal what they are saying.

Text manipulation

This involves scrambling words of a sentence and getting pupils to put them back together again. This works well in a group activity - get them to do it in groups then one person can come to the board and put in their answer.

Highlighter tool

You can use the board highlighter to pick out words in sentences. Choose different colours for picking out different parts of speech.

Using the sounds

One way of using sound is to have pictures of dice which you can “roll” and an mp3 file plays a recording of the number. You’ll find pictures in the gallery of your SMARTBoard.

Spinner

You can spin the wheel and land on an option - e.g. an animal.

Countdown clock

Search for “timer” in your tools and you can get a stopwatch - increase the size to fill the screen. You can set the timer and it increases the pace of the lesson as the pupils can also see how long they have left.

La Boite Magique

You can drag words into the magic box e.g. the infinitive of a verb, and when it goes into the box it will reveal the first person present form of the verb. The pupil will first have been asked to write the first person present form of the verb, and then they’ll check in the box whether they were right.

You could also drag words into the box and, if they are masculine, they will stay shown in the box; if they are feminine, they will disappear when they go into the box. This is just done with matching up colours and using the “send to front/back” function.

Dragging and dropping words and objects

You can drag and drop words around sentences - particularly useful when teaching German word order, for example. You could also get pupils to drag towns and cities in France to the correct position on the map, then they can drag weather symbols onto the map to do a forecast. Use a French weather website, e.g. Meteo France, to see what the weather is like at that moment.

Coming soon - tips on:

• using the internet with IWBS - Allocine, CILT on YouTube, Catherine Tate on YouTube, Eddie Izzard on YouTube (watch for ages of pupils when using these). Youtube.com/routesintolanguages. Commeaucinema.com tells you the names of UK/US films in French.

• software - Wendy has information on her CD Roms containing games and activities

• DVDs

Further information/tips

• Read the MFLE article ‘Interactive whiteboards’, which includes an invaluable ‘How to’ course by Wendy.
• Wendy recommends these websites for use with interactive whiteboards in primary and secondary languages.
• Find the “freeze” function on your board which means you can freeze what’s on the board but then play about with what’s on your PC. She will put a black dot on her next slide to remind her to freeze it.
• Take care not to have too much “one pupil”-type activity or just yourself talking and asking for responses - mix it up with group work.
• SMART software is a free download from the SMART website.
• Use the “infinite cloner” by right-clicking on an object then chossing that option. This means when you drag an object away somewhere, another one will appear.

About Wendy

Wendy Adeniji works as a teacher, trainer and consultant specialising in the use of ICT to teach languages. She regularly delivers training to schools, local authorities and Regional Support Groups. She is a consultant for the BBC, QCA and CILT.

She writes teaching materials for Heinemann and training materials for Learning and Teaching Scotland, and is the MFL moderator for the NgfL Teacher Resource Exchange. Wendy also writes regularly for the TES on matters relating to MFL and ICT.

Kath Holton leads a workshop on the myriad of ways you can use digital voice recorders and fun plug-ins like Voki on your school blog or website, in an effort to improve students’ performance in foreign language speaking.

The MFLE already carries some ideas on using digital voice recorders in the preparation of speaking assessments, but Kath was keen to look at how we prepare students for success, and motivate them in the process.

Using cheap, digital voice recorders and plenty of rechargeable batteries Kath has set up a system where students can record material out on the move, keeping an oral log of work, a reference of what language they’ve learnt. The pay-off? Where these particular students would be losing revision materials, their assessment preparations and personal plans, they are rescued by the system they have worked at maintaining throughout the year, storing and listening to each other’s revision material from the school server.

Peer-assessment works best

More than that, they can listen to ‘correct’ versions of language from their teacher. Yet this is not the most effective means of revision, says Kath, based on some action research from Joe Dale. The most effective revision comes from listening to peers’ recordings, critically appraising it as well as ’stealing’ elements of language used by other students. This, of course, fits perfectly within the class’s assessment for learning work, and has created an atmosphere of real mutual respect. Students critical appraise within a two stars and a wish structure, offering both positive aspects of each other’s work as well as suggesting room for improvement. It makes me think of the audio and PowerPoint “Rate My Mates” peer-assessment being done by students in Huntly under Adam Sutcliffe’s supervision.

Which kit would I use to get started?

Several Scottish teachers at the conference swore by their purchase of the Aigo, a low-cost MP3 recorder and player.

Moving on from just recording stuff: Vokis

Vokis are free web-based animated characters that move and respond to the tone of your voice, as recorded on the MP3 recorder. Here’s an example of how they can be used from Kath’s S1/Year 7 class. Having registered for Voki, uploaded an MP3 recording from the portable recorder to Voki, she then copied and pasted the Voki into a ‘wiki’, a webpage she and her students can edit. You can set up your own wiki on Wetpaint, PBWiki or Wikispaces. And even if you don’t have a microphone or MP3 recorder, you can type your text into Voki and one of it’s electronic voices (which are remarkably human and can sound rather French) will read your text for you.

Peer assessment on your Voki

Even more exciting is the potential for peers to leave audio comments on each other’s work, pointing out where improvements can be made and, of course, providing an oral example of what they mean. It takes written “two stars and a wish” that little bit further. Click the little notepad logo on the bottom right of the girl Voki on this page for an example. For stronger students, Kath has had them create Vokis with added mistakes, so that classmates can create their own Voki replies in this way to correct them. Take a look at the Daily Routine talk, riddled with purposeful errors, to see how this lad’s peers responded in the ‘notepad’ comments.

Vokis have also proven invaluable for checking students’ spelling. Where students write ‘qui’ instead of ‘oui’ (quite a common spelling/typo error) the spoken Voki voice will say what it sees, not what the student wants it to see. Mistake found. Problem sorted.

Participants at the conference are now heading off to try for themselves. Why not try yourself?

If you’ve never recorded audio before, and want to find out how, you can learn how with the MFLE’s first steps in podcasting.

The international dimension of learning, says the British Council’s John Low, is all about belonging to a community. It’s about seeing the importance and opportunity within an international community. It’s about preparing youngsters for jobs we can’t visualise in places we don’t know yet. The British Council’s Global Gateway programme helps set up the kind of links that make it easier to be part of this international community.

The global village

Travel is shrinking the world. Some colleagues have traveled from Glasgow to Chicago. For the weekend. It’s as easy to get to the other side of the world as it is to get to London.

The environment has made our world smaller. What happens in one corner of the world 8000 miles away affects us here and now. The next major war is, it is feared, going to be fought over water, not oil.

Information and communications have changed, to allow us to watch television from the perspective of another country, to see what we want when we want it, online, 24/7.

Politics has led to more freedom of movement in Europe, with huge shifts of population from the East of Europe to, in particular, the UK, changing the languages climate almost overnight. New challenges exist not just for modern languages teachers, but for teachers of English, too.

The challenge

Language-learning offers possibly the greatest chance to explore these challenges of our current world, as well as a medium through which to communicate and discover them. Yet, continually, we see languages education being eroded by policies of Local Authorities and schools who see languages as being only for a certain type of student (Ed’s note: it would seem from this we’re almost seeing a move back to 1950s attitudes of who studies languages). This, almost certainly, through a perception of difficulty in language learning.

However, it’s the learning approaches, how we innovate them, enhance problem-solving, offer intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to learn languages, through looking at how we put learning into real-life contexts, offering them support, emphasising the relevance to employability. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence opens these doors up, and it’s up to Scotland’s languages teaching profession to seize this opportunity.

Professor Richard Johnstone continues to be in awe of what new technologies permit language learners of 2008 to do, things which back in his 1950s school career would be only a dream.

In the 1950s language was taught as a written code, with the technology of a course book, jotter, pencil, dictionary and a ‘reader’. It enabled Class 2a, 1950, the top stream, to read texts like this. And they knew how to pronounce it all. The first lessons of the year would be phonetics, so that even the newest of words would present no difficulty to the learner in terms of pronunciation. It was very limiting, of course, since the learners rarely spoke the language at all. But can modern technology match the 1950s technology for its ability to help students read the language?

In the 1960s and 70s, the possibility of travel came over the horizon with the birth of the package holiday. The course-book was born, using imaginary characters to create a sensation of speaking and reading the language ‘for real’.

During the 80s and into 2000, we saw increased use of course books which finally went beyond the stereotypical characters, becoming more lifelike with more colourful photographs and realia within. Flashcards and graded readers (to cope with the wider range of students) joined the first computer technology, in the form of the language lab and BBC Micro computer. But it also saw the increasing linking of objectives of learning to the objectives of the language examination.

Moving forward in the 21st Century

Group-work takes over, based on pupils undertaking a research task using a computer amongst other tools, but splitting themselves into a production team, with a web researcher, books researcher and graphic artist. This, in a primary six classroom in Aberdeen, where students as young as eight years old are learning in near total language immersion.

Partners in Excellence provided a model of how language learning could be made seductive for teens who would normally be running away from languages towards, well, anything else. With an online community feature of the weekly surgery - a real-life teacher on the end of a virtual language clinic - students were using technology both for research and for face-to-face virtual coaching.

Technology-use in language learning isn’t about getting capacity. It’s about becoming a different sort of person, and that is what both of these projects have managed to achieve.

Prof Johnstone (retired) has become a changed person thanks to technology, too. He is teaching himself in Cantonese and Mandarin, using Quizlet to test himself on the 1038 Chinese characters he needs to know, and using the technology’s advice to work on those he needs to hone down. His motivation has gone through the roof, desperate to get over the 1000 word barrier.

This, if anything, would have reinforced the 1950s learning through reading. If only we could match part of our past pedagogies, with some of our modern technologies.

Soon: the full audio from this talk.

Margaret Cassidy from Stirling’s ICT Team talks this afternoon about Crazy Talk, software which allows you to transform illustrations and photographs into (almost walking) talking videos.

Margaret’s been working with LTS’s Consolarium on integrating Crazy Talk across the curriculum and at Communicate.08 will show how it’s being used in Modern Languages. While we wait to catch up with her, take a look at some of the work that’s already been done in Stirling with Crazy Talk.