La Lingua è bella!

Using Wordle with my AS Class

Following on from Jose Picardo's blogpost about this a while back, I had a look at using Wordle with my Lower 6th class today. We are looking at l'amitié/la famille, so I started out by giving 3 groups of 4 students a Wordle to discuss, and elicited from them (en français, bien sûr!) what they thought its provenance and content might be. Thsi brought up some useful media vocab. It was interesting how even a group of relatively high achievers like these took a while to look at the Wordles in any depth, although pleasingly some very good suggestions started to come out eventually once they got the idea. Here's how the lesson went:

• I made 3 separate word clouds from different sources - one from a forum on friendship, one from the fr.wikipédia entry on le divorce, and one from a forum about reasons people start divorce proceedings. Each group had a different cloud.
• The students were tasked with working out a) what the article was about and b) what media they thought it came from
• after time to work on this with access to wordreference.com, we looked at each one in turn on the projector and discussed key vocab - issues such as register, opposites, groups of words and internet terminology came up
• Students then were given a link on a Word document to a web forum we had used for one of the clouds, and asked to find certain key phrases to describe what a true friend is.
• Having done this they were directed to the forum I had already set up on our VLE and their homework was to post a reply to my opinion on what a true friend is, using new vocabulary from today's lesson.

Many thanks to Jose for the inspiration for this. There are refinements I would make to what was a quickly prepared lesson, but the students responded very positively, were motivated by it and specifically said they preferred it to some of the other approaches we use!

Ados.Fr Amitie

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Using Google Maps in MFL

My year 10 class have just finished doing their Google Maps powerpoint presentations! They clearly found this a motivating activity and, when asked for feedback, said that they felt the vocabulary "stuck in (their) head" better, and that it had helped them think about forming the perfect tense too. This activity took us three 40 minute lessons to complete. Normally the material covered would take much less time, but as they put their colour printouts up on my classroom wall I noticed some students who had previously been quite demotivated taking real pride in the work they had done. They certainly produced more than they would have had I asked them to write a journey in town in their books, and the work is infinitely better presented. The editing process we went through was very beneficial to them - I would not allow too many mistakes to go into them so they got more and more adept at spotting their own errors... amazing to get this group thinking critically about their writing! You can see some of the work they produce below, along with the original tutorial video on how to do this. For these lesson I produced an example piece of work and an instructions sheet for them to refer to, rather than distract them with a video of me...!

Les Directions En Ville

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Prezi - a world of possibilities?

I have just started to use Prezi in the classroom, beginning with my Società Italiana who I have been using as cavie . I have had some very good feedback from them about it - Prezi certainly seems to afford a lot of flexibility and helps give students a sense of where they are going and how they are going to get there. Here is the Prezi from our fifth lesson together. I used it to revise physical descriptions orally, to introduce new vocab, to show images as a basis for listening activities, to introduce grammar and to inject our weekly dose of cultura italiana....

Trying out Typepad iPhone app & thoughts on school trips

As we make our way home from the warmth and hospitalty of Dublin, it has occurred to us a) how lucky we are to get to go and share these trips with our pupils and b) what a crying shame it would be were they to be CRB-ed out of existence. Are we really going to let tabloid-driven hysteria over child protection rob our students of such experiences? Our U12 and U13 rugby and hockey teams have been across the water and seen a new culture at first hand. They have experienced homesickness, nerves and excitement and found that complete strangers can be welcoming, caring and warm. Many have made firm friends and leave with invitations to return to their host families. If, as proposed, every parent to host a child in our country has to go through the rigmarole of checks and red tape, how are we to give our students such great opportunities for learning and personal growth? How ironic if trips which break down barriers between students from different countries are lost as a result of the culture of fear and suspicion which seems to be gaining ground in the UK. As it is, I am delighted to report that the spirit of rugby is alive and well and a brilliant - and valuable - time was had by all.

Year 7 Wallwisher - Ma maison

I tried out setting a Wallwisher homework with my Year 7s today, after introducing them to the rooms of the house in French. It seems to have worked very well so far - it's 7 p.m. and 19 posts have come in already from a class of 27....

... and here are all 27... what a good class, all done!

Dans ma maison il y a.... by Monsieur Howells

寧

寧 is Chinese for peace, and is pronounced "Ning"...., according to Wikipedia, and is also the name of an online platform for people to create their own social networks. I had never heard of it before this week, but now @spanishsam has very kindly set one up for MFL teachers in the North West. Great idea Sam! It's the sort of thing that I always thought there should be in the back of my mind , so it's great to see it appear as if by magic.... let's hope it goes on to be a big success. We certainly need to collaborate and swap ideas more than ever with languages so under threat. Check it out at http://mflnorthwest.ning.com/

Glogster - a first look for me

Oh, the magic of twitter! I was tweeting this evening to see if anyone knew how to use accents on Glogster... many thanks to @glogstereduman who popped up to say that the Arial font supports accents - I'd better check it out!

Things I will try out this term!

OK, so I am putting together a plan of things I would like to try out this half term:

• Year 7 French - Storybird
• Year 10 French - Glogster on Ma région
• Year 9 German - I want to use the FLIP camera with these classes - Restaurant reservations
• Year 11 - Prezi - to look at how to write successfully at GCSE
• Year 12 French - Wordle - with their upcoming essays which I have asked them to do in Word. Also - a Wiki towards the end of the term to try and put together all our topic knowledge

The other new thing I would like to try out this term is Moblogging. We are running a Year 8 trip to the Christmas Markets in Germany which would be an ideal opportunity to go for this.

I have a few more mundane things to sort out before I can get onto this - which is good motivation!

MFL Flashmeeting

I found the MFL flashmeeting (a virtual online meeting) a really great experience tonight.  There are so many inspiring and positive MFL teachers out there - it is such a boost to see this! Also great to see "La Vaca Lola" in action again...!

I'm looking forward to working my way through some of the new approaches I have learned when we return for the next half term - I will post a plan of that on here tomorrow.

Many thanks to Esther Hardman and Joe Dale for organising things so well.

You can see the meeting here: MFL Flashmeeting

By Toutatis!

Nice editorial in the Guardian today about Asterix and the gentle fun it pokes at national stereotypes.
My favourite Asterix name?

Roman Centurion Dubius Status. Can't beat it...