Pod/Vodcast Challenge

Tis summer, the birds are singing, year 11-13 gone (except for me!), life is sweet!

My challenge - get a pupil recorded pod/vodcast in any subject area by the end of Term. All you need to do is provide details of how (maybe a lesson plan to use an old fashioned OFSTED loved phrase) and pupil work. The more unusual the better, and getting outsiders involved a plus. Results to be voted on here, deadline my return from Cretan funny farm (In-laws) I go to each summer - so end of first week August?

You up for the challenge?

I love your websiite, it's funny

While I love that comment (it shows they are coming), how to I get them to interact?

Blue Skies v Reality

Throughout the blogosphere there seems to be those who do, versus those who advocate.

In the limited time of waiting from the chicken balti courtesy of my other half, a big blogs up to:

Joe Dale
José Picardo
Mrs Moodle

For making it real!

Tis then end of half term, and perhaps I am getting emotional, but I love the care, attention to detail, and the practical application in evidence in these blogs.

May they blog fruitfully!

Year 7 French Assessments

I hate end of year exams. I'll repeat that, I really hate them!

I thought I'd concentrate on Listening and Writing as the end of year skills this year with my 2 small groups, and provide a focussed activity to allow Level 4 and 5. I will do a sneaky reading activity as well but won't tell them until after the event...

I'd love to do a Voki activity for speaking, but alas resources and time are so limited!

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Getting Year 7 into Languages.

As part of our new KS3 curriculum review, we have decided to bombard year 7 with a weekly 10 minute activity on language learning as a general idea during the first 1/2 term. We need to stress the use of language learning skills, and provided a context for French. Charged with thinking, I put a plan together... What do you think?

Week 1
Images of France Activity
Influence of France on culture

Week 2
I'll never go to France
French speaking community

Week 3
5 Phrases to survive (mystery language!)
Higher order thinking

Week 4
Languages in School
Identify areas of school and related languages

Week 5
I'd really like to learn…
Justify a choice of language

Week 6
Poster - Learn a language
Persuade others to learn a language

My First Animoto!

I've seen and read a lot about animoto, so I thought I'd give it a try. I love the interface, adding images and choosing music was a breeze. It certainly beats boring death by 30 powerpoints for a writing task!

From a teaching point of view, it will be a case of getting commonly used images together in a folder (in my case: hotel, camp site, caravan, villa, holiday locations, friends, family, transport, places to visit, activities to do), teaching my learners how to export powerpoint slides as images, then letting them go and be creative!

The rendering queue does seem a little slow so a filler activity will be needed while they wait, and the need for an e-mail address to sign up begs privacy issues - there is no try out without signing up, and I'm sure most of my learners haven't a clue what their school e-mail address is! I am also wondering if our filtering system will need tweaking to allow it - if so I'd better get my request in now!

I should be doing this activity towards the end of the Summer term with Year 7, so I'll let you know how I get on.

This is my first attempt below, not bad for 5 minutes work I thought!

The Joy of the Walled Garden

Many teachers get very frustrated by school filtering systems. I have lost count of the times I have chosen web based stimuli only to find them suddenly blocked.

Check out José Picardo's excellent summary of the problem, along with the hilarious examples in the comment!

Why use Blogs?

If you are looking for reasons to blog, take a look at Adam Sutcliffe's recent presentation on the power of blogging for techers and learners. I am particularily impressed with the inclusion of blogs in the Excellent Literacy outcomes!



Click to play

Importance of Languages

I have to do a year 7 assembly on the importance of languages.
i thought I'd get them shouting and physically split... What do you think?

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Ajaxdaddy.com

Bonus points for the first to incorporate a widget from http://ajaxdaddy.com/ - how very web 2.0!

Thanks to http://lifehacker.com/ for the heads up!

Twitterfeed Post

Just a test for twitterfeed.com , please ignore me.

Year 9 to GCSE Bridging Project

I have various learners following various routes with various needs....

I though of a practical maths unit to link to GCSE but need input from anyone out there!

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Quick Spanish Course

Toying with a quick 6 week Spanish course from scratch to Level 6 on a very focussed area... How does this look? I'll only have 6 weeks at 2 lessons a week, so wondering if realistic!

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Your very own PA!

I feel very special as I have a personal assistant. She keeps track of things for me: reminders, bookmarks, contacts. She is but a twitter,
email or instant message away.

Best thing of all she is available 24 hours a day and completely free!
I've been using iwantsandy.com for 6 months now and love it! I can even subscribe to the calendar "she" creates for me by rss or iCal.

Reminders are set up in (semi) plain English - remind me in 3 days to update my blog. Sandy works her magic and figures it all out.

Have a look at www.iwantsandy.com

Sent from my iPhone

Tu aimes le foot? SoccerLingua French - Espace Jeux!

SoccerLingua French - Espace Jeux!

Enjoy some football realted games and improve your French at the same time!

Starting to Integrate Year 8

We started work integrating Year 8 today... Pics of planning so far!

My Setup

I thought I'd share the ICT stuff I have, and how I use it!

At home: iMac G5 - last of the old non isight G5's. Wonderful software but showing its age.
. Great software for podcast creation! 

Asus EEE PC - used as my main laptop, running windows XP
iPhone - reminds me of what I need to do. Going to buy AV cable for school to show youtube on projector - does that make me bad?

School: Acer laptop - runs windows XP and loads of RM stuff. It is both a godsend and infuriating! I often have to shove my EEE PC into my bag to do anything adventurous! It works fine as a register taker, does a great job of word and powerpoint, but really gets me annoyed for file sync (my desktop looks a mess even if I clear it up). RM Tutor software is the bees knees though with control over the web and chance to do surveys!

Finally I have lots of USB drives and DVDs of backups just in case!

iCal to Rss - ouch

I create my lesson plans in iCal. Well I say that, but Bento is the engine behind it on my mac.

I am desperate to find an easy iCal to RSS tool to share learning objectives with my learners. The best I have found is netvibes, but this is not embedded. Any ideas?

Flash is good... Flash is hell

I keep finding so many Adobe Flash based resources!

Flash is so pretty and easy. Problem is is depends on so many factors! Sometimes behind my firewall it works, other times I get a bit of the app, mostly I get evil filtered icon.

Flash is not open, adobe keep the source code very secret. There are better methods for creating content, but we all follow the flash route (yes I am guilty, just look at my class blog).

Does anyone know of decent open source alternatives that work?

My First Podcast

I bit the bullet and created my first podcast. Am I happy with the result? 50-50...

The actual process was simple - I booted up my old G5 iMac, loaded garageband and just recorded the bits of dialogue. The problem is the inbuilt iMac mic picks up all the background noise of the computer... time to invest in a microphone or perhaps use my iphone to record. Even better, I could save some pennies and by a brand new iMac:)

Uploading wasn't as obvious as a mac should be... I found it best to save the podcast to my itunes library as an mp3 then upload it.

I'll feed back if my learners find it useful.,