Word Cloud by Smart Puffin

Many thanks to @mflbassie on Twitter who alerted me to Smart Puffin's Word Cloud app for Android this morning.

It makes word clouds in the same way as many of the other available apps (I like WordItOut, Word Clouds and Jason Davies Word Cloud Generator) but it has the added bonus of incorporating emojis, which you just enter along with the words in the app.

I made this one earlier on to test the app out.  It's easy to use, although getting the fonts to an even size can be a bit tricky.  

I put in animals for this one as that happened to be what I was thinking about at the time, and it was easy to find the emojis!  Children could count how many times each animal appears or pair up words and emojis.  You could include elements of writing frames as a different sort of guide to independent writing.

Have a play!

Wheel Decide

Many thanks to Danièle Bourdais for telling me about Wheel Decide at Language World on Saturday.  

There are plenty of apps around that do the same or a similar thing, but they aren't of much use to me in the classroom.  This online wheel is easy to customise, then you just copy and paste the resulting URL to be able to use it when and where you want.  

The wheels can also be embedded.  Here's the one I've made for one of my Year 5 classes who are working on sports, and I'm trying to find lots of different ways to help them with their "I play" and "I do" sentences.  We're going to spin the wheel and then they have to say the correct sentence for the sport that it lands on.  Give it a try!

My Library

A couple of weeks ago Nathalie Paris told me about the My Library app.  She, in turn, had been told about it by Sylvie Doyle.  Now, I have a lot of books that I use both in my teaching and to inform my teaching.  I have blogged about a lot of them on here before, but I've never made an attempt to record anywhere the books that I have.  This app seemed to be a way of doing that, and a way of sharing my library afterwards.

The My Library app enables you to build up a list of your books quickly and easily.  You scan the barcode on the book, which records the ISBN number and locates the book.  Then you can add a Series (I've used this to enter the language the book is in or its theme, e.g. Pedagogy) and any number of categories.  For example, when scanning one of my copies of the Hungry Caterpillar, I entered it into the French series and gave it the categories Numbers, Food, Fruit and Days of the Week:

Now that I have all 422 of my books in my library on the app, I can use the search to find certain themes.  For example, let's say I want to find other books that I can use for Days of the Week, all I need to do is to select it in the search.  I tap on "All categories" first:

And then select the category that I'm looking for:

And here are all my books that have something to do with Days of the Week:

Doing this has highlighted that I have a lot of books about animals, food and colours, but very few or none about other topic areas that I teach.

I scanned all my books in with my phone, and it took several sessions over two weeks.  I've been able to export the library and its pictures so that I now have a copy on my tablet as well.  It's not possible to share the list with someone else without it overwriting all their books.  However, you can export your library as an Excel spreadsheet, which is easy to share and to sort.  The only slight downside of this is that all the categories end up in the same column and you can't use them to sort the books.  You can, though, highlight categories using the "Find" function.

I've uploaded my Excel library to Google Drive, and you can browse it here.

In a geekie way I've enjoyed reacquainting myself with all my books and recording what exactly I have!

Educandy.com

For easy interactive activities I have been mourning the demise of Sugarcane, which ceased to be in June this year.

This morning on the Modern Language Teachers' Lounge Facebook group, I found out about educandy, a new interactive game creator from the Linguascope team.

I have created an account and created my first activity.

I clicked on "My Activities" and then on the red icon to create a set of matching pairs:

I then entered my pairs of words or "questions and answers".

When I had done this, I could scroll down and see the selection of games that I could play using this word set:

When I scrolled down further, I could see the code for this set of games, its URL and also the embed code:

The code for this activity, as you can see, is 15b.  Students can enter this code in the box in the top right of the home page and go straight to the activity:

It's also possible to embed activities:

I have been trying all this out on my laptop, and it has been very straightforward.  I have also had a go at the games.  The only downside for me is that the text on the games is small (very small in the case of the crossword clues) and therefore not very suitable for using on the interactive whiteboard.  A big positive, though, is that there is an educandy app available for both Android and Apple.  Students input the reference code and are taken straight to the choice of activities that you have designed.  This is what is looks like on my Android tablet once I have entered the code.  As you can see, I had to enter zeros for the missing digits in my code.  The games are clearer on the tablet screen.

All in all, educandy looks like a promising resource, especially if, like me, you have a Sugarcane-shaped hole in your life that needs filling. It's easy to use, quickly and easily produces activities that are clear and fun to play.  Have a go!

Story Dice

Yesterday morning I found in my Inbox an email alert containing this post from Richard Byrne.  It mentions Story Dice for Android.  This afternoon I downloaded the app to have a play.

You get three vertical rows of dice, which roll when you tap on them, to display sets of images like this:

Once students have rolled the dice, they could take a screenshot and then annotate it in Screen Master.  I have done this example, where I have used each image as a stimulus for a sentence in the target language.  This might work as a revision activity for older learners.

Clozemaster

A few days ago I saw this tweet from Lindsay Williams (@LDLanguages):

I asked her about how Clozemaster works, liked the sound of it and had a search for it.  Very luckily there is an Android app!  There is also a web interface, and I presume there is a fruit-based app also.

I've mentioned before that I am learning German at the moment (daughter #1 begins her GCSE German course in September) and so far have been using Duolingo and Stimmt 1.  

Here's how it works.  You need to sign up for an account and give yourself a username.  Then you choose the language you want to work on.  This is my dashboard:

I've chosen to work on the 100 most common words to begin with and am quite chuffed how much I know from Duolingo.

When you select the words you want to work on, you get different options:

I've chosen the top multiple choice.  I might be brave and do the text input version later!  This is an example of a question.  You have the sentence with the gap and four options underneath.  Helpfully, you have the English translation as well to help you to find the correct word.

You tap on the word you think fills the gap, and you get instant feedback:

If you get it wrong, the same question comes around again before you finish the round.

I think this would be very useful for Key Stage 4 students wanting some consolidation of basic sentences, and of course anyone who, like me, is learning a new language in their own time!

Ideas for Ultratext and PicPlayPost

Warning: this blogpost contains flashing images!

Over the weekend Joe Dale introduced me to Ultratext and its partner app, PicPlayPost.  I've been having a play with them and thought I'd show you some ideas for how you could use them in the languages classroom.

1.  Reading out loud and/or translating sentences:

2.  Reading sentences out loud, substituting words for pictures as necessary:

It's easy to colour code masculine and feminine words and other word classes.

3.  Practising numbers.  Say the numbers out loud as you see them.  You may miss some the first few times but will get better the more times you see it:

4.  Odd one out.  Which is the odd one out of these four Spanish articles?  There may be more than one possible answer, but as long as you can justify your answer grammatically you will be correct:

5.  Look at the pictures and say the correct words.  It will take a while to be able to say all the words:

6.  Import Ultratexts into PicPlayPost alongside a picture.  Which sentence describes the picture?  Alternatively there could be a scrolling sentence alongside 4 pictures.  PicPlayPost has lots of different frames.

7.  Import Ultratexts into PicPlayPost and ask children to answer questions.  You could number each square but I think it's more effective to do each group of words in one colour, as I have here, so that the children can give a colour for their answer:

a. Who likes milk?

b. Who likes cheese?

c.  Who likes fish?

d. Who likes pasta?

e. Who likes bread?

I hope these examples have given you some ideas that you can use with your classes.  Of course the children can use them to create language for you or for their classmates as well.  I'd be interested to hear what you have done with these apps.

#ililc6 - ICT and Languages Conference

I spent the weekend in Language Teacher heaven, a.k.a. the latest #ililc conference.  This year the venue moved from Southampton to Dorking, where we were hosted by the Ashcombe School, Helen Myers and ALL London.

This was the first #ililc conference that I didn't present at, and I enjoyed attending my 8 different sessions as well as, of course, catching up with old friends and making new ones.

Here are the sketchnotes from the sessions that I attended:

Find out more about Anna's work on her Twitter feed where you'll also find information about her YouTube channel.

Read more on Annalise's blog

This is a superb example of how teachers who inherit Year 7s with mixed KS2 experience can do the usual in an unusual way.  The perfect example of how to tweak a scheme of work to cover the necessary structures within a more mature and interesting context.

The focus of the weekend was very much on the use of technology to enhance language teaching and learning, and consequently I found myself downloading new apps to play with.  These are the new apps that I have on my (Android) tablet:

I'm looking forward in particular to playing with Ultratext (see above!) and using it to make reading activities, as well as making some activities for Light Bulb Languages using QR codes.  If I can get network issues sorted out I would really like to experiment with Plickers.

Android apps

I have purchased a new Android tablet specifically for using at school.  I have a Sony Experia for my own personal use, but this one is a Google Nexus 7.  I chose it for two main reasons.  Firstly, it has a front and rear facing camera, and secondly it is handbag sized!  

I'm intending to use it a lot for taking pictures of the children's work. At the moment I use my little digital camera for this, but using the tablet will not only make the blogging process much quicker, but I will also be able to use Pic Collage and other apps to make the photos more interesting for the blog.  I also want to use it for sound recording, to record the children singing and for the children to be able to record themselves speaking.

A few weeks ago I received from Joe Dale an email about the documents that he has written to support the use of ICT in the Niveau Bleu French materials.  On the above screenshot you can see the apps that I already had and have used, in addition to apps mentioned by Joe in the aforementioned document and Android versions of some of those iPad apps.

I hope this is of use to other Android users.  If there are any Android apps that you have found particularly useful, please let me know!

My #ililc4 takeaways

It's all over for another year.  #ililc4 has passed and we look forward to #ililc5.  But the buzz will take a long time to die down.  Both the learning that took place and the teaching that it will inspire will endure.

There have already been many blogposts written by those who delivered workshops and presentations, as well as those who attended them, so I am not going to reproduce my notes here.  I am, though, going to tell you my takeaways - the things that I learned.

Putting the Pedagogy in the Technology - Joe Dale

Crowd source responses to a certain question by providing a link (for example by QR code) to a Google Form.  The responses can then be copied and pasted into Wordle for instant display.  This could work just as well in the classroom as in a conference setting.

Use Storify to collect media from across the web, publish them and embed them anywhere.

Karen Whitehead's blog/website is an excellent source of ideas, in particular for homework and speaking.

Use the Flipboard app to create a digital magazine which you can then share.


To Infinity and Beyond - Tom Hockaday

Give out a "Linguist of the Fortnight" certificate, presented in assembly, "in recognition of outstanding achievement and effort".


Talking Tools - Dominic McGladdery

See Dom's presentation on Slideshare.

Dice game - throw the dice and the students have to say that number of words in the language.

Use hats, masks and disguises to encourage students to speak!

Dom gave us a list of useful apps, both fruit-based and for Android.  Here are the ones I downloaded there and then:

Three of them are not ones that Dominic mentioned, but ones that I found by following a trail from somewhere else, or by looking for an Android equivalent of an i-app.  I had a play with Tellegami and here is the result:


The one I played around with the most was Best Voice Changer.  It's a simple little app which I think my two daughters will enjoy playing with as well.  You record your voice, and then have three ways of digitally altering it.  My favourite part is adding the background noise.  I put myself on the battlefield:


When I was looking for an Android version of the Puppet Pals app, I found Comic Puppets Lite, which is good fun and easy to use.  You can articulate each of the puppet's joints.

To this list I would also add Rory's Story Cubes, which you have to pay for.  It was good to have the time to play with the different apps (we were in competition for a prize!) and I am looking forward to investigating them further over half term as well as putting some of them onto the Vega for the children at school to have a go with.


Flipping the MFL Classroom

Thanks to Sadie McLachlan I found out what the Flipped Classroom is all about.  It's a really interesting concept, preparation-heavy, but then the teacher doesn't have to do as much in the classroom afterwards.

In Sadie's department they make their videos and presentations with Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, Explain Everything, Edynco and eduCreations.


Something old, something new - Lisa Stevens

Lisa referred to the new Programme of Study for Key Stage 2 and showed us some ways of teaching speaking and writing.

I particularly liked the Animal Symphony, which is part of Lisa's Carnival of the Animals unit.  Clap the syllables of the animal names.  Different groups of children have different animals to repeat and repeat to a certain rhythm.

Lisa pointed out that non-fiction books in the target language are just as important as fiction.  Sara Vaughan told us that Usborne do a range of their children's books in French, like this Ancient Egyptians one.

Lisa designed a Habitats lesson, where the children match animal cards to the appropriate habitat, and then used the resulting information to write sentences such as "Un camello vive en el desierto".  This also explained to me why Lisa and I had had a long Twitter conversation about how to say "pond skater" in Spanish!

I really like the idea of the Human Fruit Machine, where a line of children hold one each of one of those big dice with the pockets into which you can put cards with pictures or words.  Each child spins their dice and stops randomly, giving a sentence.  A bit like a writing frame!


Pinterest for the foreign language teacher - Isabelle Jones

I had been looking forward to this presentation, and it did not disappoint!  I have had a Pinterest account for some time, but really had no idea how to use it.  Finding out that there is an app has been the biggest single discovery - makes it very easy to use.  Isabelle gave us lots of tips to help us to use it effectively.  I'm now following people in my PLN rather than some random 133 followers who I picked up I-know-not-how, and can already see lots of good ideas waiting in the wings for me to try out!


Extreme differentiation for little people - Jo Rhys Jones

Jo was talking about mixed-age classes and how to design schemes of work for them.  I don't have any mixed-age classes, but there were still plenty of good ideas on offer.

Read the third section of the KS2 Framework- lots of good ideas for curriculum design.

Give a noun on the board.  Who can extend it into the longest sentence?


Hip hop phonics - Nina Elliott

This was my favourite thing from the Show and Tell - it's always good to have more phonics strategies up your sleeve!

Split the class into three groups, who each chant one line of phonemes to a rhythm.  The second time through, each group stands up on a certain phoneme.  On the third time through, they stand up on the phoneme with a "hip hop move" as well!

Some other blogposts that you can read about #ililc4:
(These are the ones I know about - there will be more!)

Amanda Salt

John Connor

Eleanor Abrahams

Nina Elliott

Dominic McGladdery

Isabelle Jones

Samantha Broom

Rachel Smith

Chris Fuller

Vision On!

Early on Friday morning I read an email from Pinterest.  I registered with Pinterest quite some time ago, but have to admit that I haven't really done anything with it. Anyway, there was an interesting link in this email.  The skeletons reminded me of the 70s children's programme Vision On, and the character that Tony Hart made by writing and mirroring the programme name.  In 1981 I was in the 4th year of middle school, and we did a piece of art work inspired by this, where we wrote our names, mirrored them, and then painted each little section in a different shade of the same colour.  I seem to remember mine was various shades of red and pink.

Then this morning my six year old downloaded yet another app for her Android tablet.  It's called Doodle Toy, and she showed me how you can make mirrored writing with it.  So, instead of doing the work which I really need to do, I have been having a play with Doodle Toy, and thinking about how it could encourage Year 3 in particular with their writing of single words, as specified in the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages.

Using this app it's easy to create an image of, for example, an animal name, and then embellish it to make it look even more like that animal.  I have done the French animals lapin and lion.  I have also created one of my own name, about which I could write something like "Me llamo Clare.  Soy un insecto." because of the shape my name makes.  It was straightforward (after a few false starts!) to save the images to my tablet's Album for later use.

I hope it gives you some ideas for having fun with text.  I'm going to put this on my old Android tablet, which I let the children use, and see what they come up with.