Making a good resource

You may know that I have been making resources for some time.  25 years in the profession and 16 years sharing online have given me plenty of time to find a style that works and that other people are happy to use.  I made this video to show how I make a resource and to give my tips and tricks about fonts, images and so on.  I hope it helps you with your own resources.

DIY cliparts

I get a lot of the cliparts I use from Pixabay.com as it is a reputable provider of copyright-free images.  You can never guarantee that an image you've found via a Google search is copyright-free, even if you've selected "free to use, share or modify, even commercially" on an advanced search.

Sometimes I can't find the sort of thing I'm looking for, and so I make my own.  I do this using MS Publisher and its Autoshapes function.  Earlier on today, I needed some smilies to illustrate opinions, but couldn't find the exact images I was looking for in a high enough quality.  So I made the ones above.  Below is a screen capture to show you how I did it:


I learned how to do this from the late, great Bev Evans, who was so generous with her expertise.  You can still find her videos about how to make faces, flowers and backgrounds on YouTube.

So if you can't quite find the image you want, why not try some DIY?!

PS  If you'd like to use these smiley cliparts, they are available to download on the Light Bulb Languages Facebook page.

Spirals and Waves (updated)

Nearly four years ago I blogged about Festisite, a very useful site that you can use to make word spirals and waves.  Since then, the settings of the site have changed a little, and more shapes have been added.

The options are now listed down the right hand side, and you can see a preview of the eventual output.

To generate the PDF, you now have to click on the "Printable Document" button.  I still recommend selecting a large-size font (I use 26 or 28) and A3 paper in order to generate a large image that will be good quality when you crop and shrink it.  The Preview button speaks for itself, while the Download button will generate the PDF for you.

You can see an example of a spiral above.  Can you find the Spanish numbers 0-15 in it ?  This particular one can be differentiated for lower ability by taking out the extra letters that are not part of the numbers.  The spirals can be used in other ways as well.  For example: how many of each Spanish number 1 to 6 can you see in this spiral ?

The spiral generator will also make egg-shaped spirals:

I like to use the wave setting to make word snakes, like this one:

as well as to make "wavy paragraphs" in which to find words or phrases.

The Valentine setting puts your words around a heart.  This is useful for anything to do with opinions.  For example: Which fruits does this person like?

So have a go with Festisite and see what you can make!

Shape up with Tarsia

At the ICT and Languages Conference in Southampton this weekend I have presented a workshop on using Tarsia to make shape puzzles for use in the languages classroom.  You can read my previous posts about Tarsia here and here.

The PowerPoint that I used in Southampton would not be much use for telling you more about how to use Tarsia, so I have recorded a short video showing you the basics:

 

You can also download my Tarsia guide and my brand new Ideas for using Tarsia sheet. 

Here are the links to the animal puzzle that I made in the video:

French animal square puzzle
French animal puzzle table
French animal puzzle solution


You can also try out the countries and languages puzzle that people tried out on the day - it would be great for European Day of Languages:

Countries and languages hexagon puzzle 
Countries and languages table 
Countries and languages solution
Countries and languages puzzle shrunk (smaller pieces)

Some people have been asking if there is an easy way to cut out Tarsia puzzles.  Well unfortunately there isn't, but one way to lessen the load is to give the printed out puzzles to the students to cut out and then assemble.  I always wait until there is something good on TV before I cut out Tarsias, and it makes the time pass more quickly!  I also number each set so that when (not if) I find a puzzle piece on the floor I know which set it came from.  Some people were also asking where I got the grip-seal bags that I store the puzzles in - they are these ones.

Ecoutez Répétez

Last Sunday morning @Langwitch asked via Twitter if anyone had any ideas for choral repetition that weren't "Repeat if it's true".

I replied with a few suggestions, and @spsmith45 and @bellaale suggested that a blogpost would be useful.  So here it is.

When I did my PGCE in secondary languages in 1994, the communicative method was all the rage and choral repetition was an integral part of it.  The idea was that by repeating the vocabulary the students would absorb almost by osmosis the sound-spelling rules for the language.  Well that didn't work.  They knew lots of words, but the sound-spelling rules were never made explicit and so they didn't transfer the knowledge to new language.  These days, thank goodness, the explicit teaching of phonics is a fundamental part of the process, and students have, therefore, the key with which to unlock the door of pronunciation.

Choral repetition is, however, just as important as before, especially for younger or beginner learners.  It is one of the teacher's roles to give the learners a good model of pronunciation, to give them the opportunity to practise making the sounds and to help them to learn the meanings of the words.  It is unfair to ask an individual to repeat a word by themselves when they have only just met it.  They are likely to be lacking in confidence and (especially with secondary students) embarrassed.  Repeating chorally as a whole class provides them with a safety net - nobody can hear them making mistakes.  

So here are some ideas for choral repetition.

In my classroom the choral repetition is always introduced with "Ecoutez répétez" or "Escuchad y repetid", after which the children know exactly what they will have to do.  Judging the right amount of repetition is an art.  You often need to do more than you would think.  If the children start to say the words with me rather than wait for me to say them first, I know that it is time to start moving on.

Visual stimuli for the repetition:

• flashcards (my personal preference as they are so versatile)
• images on a PowerPoint or IWB file
• use realia

Ideas for varying the repetition:

• repetition in silly voices  I dabble with the whisper, the squeak, the growl and the robot.
• repetition high and low  This works especially well with numbers, where you will end up saying the odd numbers in a high voice and the even numbers in a low voice.
• vary the speed and volume  Saying the word slowly really accentuates its sounds.
• practise each word with an action  Then you do the actions while the students say the words.
• music and rhythm  Some things stick better if you give them a little tune ("amarillo" and "plátanos" are good words to sing!) or if you repeat them to a rhythm.
• chef d'orchestre  One student leaves the room.  When they come back in, the whole class will start repeating the vocabulary.  One student, who you chose when the first student left the room, will give a signal to the rest of the class to tell them that they need to change to the next word or phrase.  The first student needs to work out who is giving the signal.  This is good for words or phrases that are difficult to find actions for and which you need to repeat lots of times to build confidence and embed them in the memory, such as questions.
• repeat the correct one  Hold up a flashcard and say "¿Es un gato o un perro?" (or appropriate vocabulary!)  The class repeats back the one that is correct.
• repetition in pairs  Practise the words as a whole class to build confidence.  Then give each pair a list of words or of the stimulus pictures and get them to say the words to each other.  If the speaker makes a mistake then they have to start again.  Up the challenge by timing each other! (Thanks to @pixiejojo for the idea.)
• Let the students complete the word  You say the first half of the word or phrase and the students complete it.  (Thanks to @trekkiep for the idea.)
• memorise  Create a grid on the board where you group the vocabulary according to gender, number etc..  It works well with weather in French (il+weather, il fait+weather, il y a+weather) and with things like places in town where you can group them as le, la and l'.  Repeat the words line by line, gradually removing one at a time so that you end up pointing to blank spaces.  (That's something my trusty OHP was particularly useful for.)  You'll then be able to point at a blank space on the board and have them say the right word.  Always looks good, this one, when you're pointing seemingly randomly at a board and a colleague comes in!

At the moment I am doing "Places in Town" with Y5 French and Y6 Spanish.  We have been working this week on sentences such as "A Sunderland il y a une poste et un marché, mais il n'y a pas de poissonnerie."  We repeated the first sentence lots of times, discussed what it all meant and then read it out loud together.  The children were then able to help me to piece together some more sentences using the same structure.  Living writing frames are also good for this.  Write each word or short phrase on a separate card, and make a line of students at the front holding the cards.  Repeat each card to build the sentence.  Continue repeating, gradually turning over one card at a time until you are repeating the sentence from a row of blank cards.  You can then start to change parts of the sentence by swapping certain cards and repeating again with the new word or phrase.

As a postscript, it appears that saying a word lots of times allows students to think of ways of helping them remember which is which.  One of my Y5s now remembers "une boulangerie" by thinking of "blue lingerie". Really.

Tarsia again

Following on from previous posts about Tarsia, the puzzle-making software, I have created a "how-to" guide for MFL teachers.  You can download the guide in PDF format here.


Image by the brilliant Bev Evans

#MFLSAT Oldham

Yesterday I spent a most enjoyable day at The Radclyffe School in Oldham at the third MFL Show and Tell (affectionately and tweetingly known as #MFLSAT).  It was brilliantly organised by Isabelle Jones and brought together about forty MFL teachers from all over the UK (and Germany!).

I gave a short presentation about mini-books, something which I love and which I have used successfully (in my opinion) with my primary classes.  Here is my presentation:

Mini-books

View more webinars from cseccombe.

A lot of people have asked where I got the jigsaw thing in the PowerPoint.  I actually found it quite by chance while I was looking for a suitable template for the presentation.  The instructions are here, and you can access the actual template via the same link.  As far as mini-books are concerned, the most important link is the "how to make a mini-book" one.

As is usual with #MFLSAT, I left totally enthused, my head buzzing with lots of ideas.  In no particular order, here are some of the things I'd like to try:

Selecting pupils at random to answer a question
Marie O'Sullivan showed us The Hat, which you can use to select one pupil at a time.  As far as I can see, once you've selected one particular pupil, they are then safe from selection for the rest of the lesson, unless you start the Hat up again.
Dominic McGladdery gave us lots of examples of ways to select pupils at random, starting with lolly sticks with pupils' names on which are drawn from the "Mug of Misery" (as it has been christened by Dom's pupils!)  I really like this PowerPoint random name selector from Fresherschools.com as well.
I'm particularly interested in this as it is one of the things mentioned at my PM review, and one of the teachers at my school is very keen to get all the pupils alert and not coasting.

Intercultural Understanding
Something I am very interested in (see previous posts) and so I'm always grateful for new links and ideas to help me in my endeavours. 
Marie-France Perkins showed us the website of Collège les Tamarins on the island of Réunion.  A particularly useful part of the website is the "Visite du Collège", which shows photos and plans of the school. 
Suzi Bewell showed us "Ecoles du Monde", a book written in simple French and with beautiful photographs of schoolchildren around the world.  Suzi also guided us to Links into Languages's 10 minute guide to Intercultural Understanding.

Groovy Tech Tools
Kath Holton showed us some of the tools she uses in the classroom and to facilitate home learning.  Spicynodes looks worthy of closer investigation, as does Zondle.
Vanessa Parker from The Radclyffe School showed us some PowerPoint ideas.  I liked her idea for a twist on Kim's Game.  Instead of just making a picture disappear and asking the children which one it is, Vanessa suggests asking them which one they think will disappear and giving them a point if they are right.  I also liked her idea to have a bag or basket of images flash across the screen and pupils have to name all the objects.  Flypast taken one step further.

I can't wait for the next one.  Where's it to be, guys?

Intercultural Understanding

If I had £1 for every time a student has said to me, "Why doesn't everyone speak English?", I would currently be in the Caribbean soaking up the tropical rays and sipping cocktails on board my private yacht, and not in cold, rainy Washington. 

It's a question they often ask in exasperation or to deliberately disrupt the lesson, and so my reply has often been similarly exasperated, along the lines of "It's not something that's quick to explain so if you come back at 3.30 I'll tell you all about it for half an hour."  And that usually does the trick.  Some students have been genuinely curious, and I have given them my quick "Because of history, geography, politics and religion" explanation.

In retrospect, it's a question that we should take seriously and do our best to answer in depth.  Because you cannot completely understand or appreciate a language without knowing something about the country or countries where it is spoken.  The two are inextricably linked.  For example, the Spanish phrase "hacer puente" does not always mean "to bridge" in its strictest sense.  Scratch the surface and you find out about a tradition for taking days off that you'll wish you had, and then dig a little deeper and you discover how many holidays Spanish children get compared to British children. 

What is Intercultural Understanding?  Here are two definitions:

• 
  
  “Intercultural Understanding is the ability and willingness to see things from a different cultural perspective..... It is respecting different ideas and lifestyles and recognising that your culture is not superior to others.”
• 
  
  “Appreciating the richness and diversity of other cultures.....Recognising that there are different ways of seeing the world and developing an international outlook.”

For me, Intercultural Understanding addresses and disproves the stereotypical views that Britons so often have about people from other countries, proves that our way is not necessarily the only way or the best way, and allows students access the rich and vibrant culture of the target-language country or countries through their language studies.

The photograph at the top is one of a series that I took to make a CrazyTalk video for a training session I was giving.  The little figure is one of a set of "World People" that can be purchased from the Early Learning Centre (and who you may recognise from Gorseville!)  I use them often to explain about stereotyping.  Is this what French people look like?  What do they really look like?  And interestingly, go a step further and examine why we have this stereotypical image of French people.  The BBC's "Coast" programme explains very well about the Onion Johnnies, who would have been the first and only contact that many British people had with the French.

I am a big fan of the Intercultural Understanding strand of the KS2 Framework, and am pleased that it is part of the KS3 Framework as well.  I've done my best to include Intercultural Understanding in my KS2 Spanish lessons over the last year, and I have to say that it has been harder than I anticipated.  It seems a bit false somehow, especially when you only see the children once a week, to depart from the "thread" of your lessons and stick something intercultural in.  What I have done so far, formally in any case, has been looking at the Spanish-speaking world (thanks World Cup!) and highlighting certain fiestas such as San José, San Fermín and la Fiesta Nacional de España.

After some useful tweets and research over the last couple of weeks, I have come to the conclusion that Intercultural Understanding, in my setting at least, would best be covered little and often, as a "drip-drip-drip" approach, rather than as one-off occasional lessons.

I was reading Danny Nicholson's blogpost "Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch", where he suggests displaying a photograph on the board at the beginning of the lesson to stimulate questions.  In the MFL lesson this could be a photograph of a fiesta, place, child or house from the target language country, or something a bit different like a Google Doodle.  Fiona Joyce tweeted the Google Doodle link and I could see its potential for intercultural work, as Google Doodles are something with which our young people are very familiar.  Here's one to start you off:

It's from August 27th 2008.  Which Spanish fiesta does it represent?

In September, one of the first things I will be teaching my second-year-of-Spanish pupils is the months of the year.  I am starting to make the flashcards, and have decided to put images of fiestas on each month's card, such as Reyes for January, San Valentín for February, San José for March and so on.  This will give learning what is essentially twelve words a bit more depth and purpose.

I thought I would share with you some of my favourite Intercultural Understanding links.

FRENCH

Equipment that children need to buy for La Rentrée:  What do our children buy to return to school in September?

Videos showing playground games

Collection of playground games from all over the world

24 heures de la vie d'un enfant: Study the daily routines of children from all over the world

Ton scooter est japonais: Poem reminding us that many of the things we use in our daily life come from other countries.  An easy model for students to replicate.

SPANISH

Playground games from El Huevo de Chocolate

More playground games

European Playground Games, including Choco-choco-la-la, which my KS1s and daughter love

Calendar of Spanish fiestas

Semana Santa: origen de las procesiones

Spanish customs and culture

Map puzzles: of each continent and more.  Perfect for perfecting your South American geography!

Colours in Cultures: In the West we wear black to mourn.  In South America the traditional colour is purple.


I would be interested to hear about how you teach Intercultural Understanding, and any good resources that you have come across. 

You can also read a blogpost I wrote about Intercultural Understanding for José Picardo's Box of Tricks blog.

#MFLSAT

This is a Tagxedo of my Twitter feed for the last 24 hours or so

I'm imagining a conversation with my dad:

Dad: What is #MFLSAT ?

Me: It's a hashtag, something you add to your tweet in Twitter to group your tweet with all the other tweets about the same thing.

Dad: Yes, but what is #MFLSAT ?

Me: It stands for "MFL Show and Tell". We've had two now. The first one was in Coventry in November 2009, and the second one was yesterday in Nottingham. It's where lots of like-minded MFL teachers give up their Saturday to meet together and share good practice and engage in professional dialogue. Some people give presentations about things they've done in the classroom. It's also an opportunity to meet in real life the people with whom you correspond virtually most of the time, via Twitter and other fora.

Dad: Well why didn't you just say that in the first place ?

Yes, yesterday I went to Nottingham High School with 46 other teachers from England, Scotland, Wales and Australia (yes really - it was great to see Fiona Rose there). After coffee and chocolate croissants - which were most welcome after the 3 hour drive - there were 7 presentations on subjects as diverse as recording from Skype and the French vowel Haka.

We were really fortunate that all the presentations were filmed and streamed live on the internet by @eyebeams, so you can watch them all here. Thanks to a tip-off from Lisa Stevens, I've been able to embed the video of my presentation below. I talked about my RecorderPen, about which I had already written a blogpost:




After a very nice lunch in the high school dining hall (gadget of the day - the conveyor belt where you put your tray afterwards!) we had some round-the-table discussions about, amongst other things, VLEs, Language Labs, using ICT to enhance speaking work, e-safety and international links.

The day was sponsored by the high school, Links into Languages, Naace and Scholastic. The first MFLSAT cost us each £10, and was a more low-key affair. I had been concerned before yesterday that this event would be too "corporate" and that it would change the feel of the MFLSAT. But I needn't have worried. The sponsorship enhanced our comfort and the catering, but little else changed, for which I am grateful.

So what did I learn, and what am I going to try ?

• You can export selections of an Audacity file as .wav My podcasts will be a lot quicker to do now I won't be cutting mp3s up into bits and saving them all as individual .wav files. (I know, Dom, I was a plonker not to know this before!)
• Get KS2s to do writing on mini-whiteboards, then photograph them for assessment evidence. Cuts down on paper for them and me, mistakes are easier to correct, and I always have my camera with me anyway.
• I MUST have a go with Prezi and play a bit with Sliderocket.
• Have a go with Xtranormal to make starters and listening activities for KS2 and maybe KS1.
• I love singing, the children love singing, so I must make an effort to do it more. And of course, the Spanish vowel Haka.

Do you fancy getting involved in something like this ? In these days of rarely cover and dwindling funds, teachers have to take the initiative as far as their CPD is concerned. Twitter is one way of finding out what opportunities are out there. You might also be interested in these:

Primary Languages Meet (#PLMeet) in Doncaster on Monday 27th September 2010

MFL Flashmeeting 8 - Monday 27th September 20.30-22.30, link to follow

And for you Mackems out there, there's the Sunderland TeachMeet on Thursday 14th October 2010.

Hope to see you there!

Working with partner schools overseas

When I first started working with partner schools overseas, in 1997, communicating with partners and exchanging project work involved faxes, telephones, files, CDs, video tapes, books, pieces of art and craft work.... and many expensive trips to the Post Office to post it all. It took time for it all to reach the partners, and just as long for them to send theirs to us. Everything took a long time. Over the years, however, thanks to all the new technology that is out there, this communication and sharing of work has become much easier, quicker and cheaper. There are many web tools that we can use now to collaborate with our partners.

Two of the tools that have really taken off in the MFL world are Storybird and Storyjumper. Brian Stobie, the international officer for County Durham, discovered Storybird recently and could immediately see its use for partnership work. He asked me to give a presentation about Storybird and Storyjumper at the Atlas (RNIL) conference today. I agreed to speak for 10 minutes, just to give delegates a taster and to whet their appetites to find out more. I decided to present Storybird and Storyjumper as a story. I hope you like it.


Here is a Storybird that I wrote in collaboration with Dominic McGladdery.  I wanted Fiona Joyce, queen of the MFL Storybird Wiki, to be involved as well, but at the moment you can only collaborate with one other person.
What do you like to do ? by d_mcg, CSeccombe on Storybird

Storybird and Storyjumper aren't of course the only programs that can be used in this way.  You could also try Voki, Wallwisher, Voicethread, Xtranormal and GoAnimate, to name but a few.  And you could set up a blog or wiki for the partnership so that you have some shared webspace via which to share your work.  Anything that motivates you and your students to sustain your partnership and make it meaningful can only be a good thing.

One year on......

I published my first blog post here on 28th June 2009. Over the last week or so I've been thinking about the things I have learned over the last year, and I thought I would share them with you here. These are not only things that I have learned about, but also things that I have used either in the classroom or elsewhere in my work this year.

• Storybird and Storyjumper:  First of all, two tools which almost need no introduction, such has been their success amongst the language teachers in my PLN and beyond.  All of the Storybirds that I have created appear on the fantastic MFL Storybird Wiki, the brainchild of Fiona Joyce, and you can see my Storyjumpers on this very blog (look at the tabs at the top).  I have found the programs invaluable for presenting appropriate text-level work to my KS2 pupils, but they haven't been able to try it out for themselves for ICT reasons, if you know what I mean....  
    
• Mini-books:  I discovered mini-books quite by accident while looking for something else.  I knew that it was something that I wanted to try, but determined to find the right occasion.  My KS2 pupils created mini-books containing their own stories based on a mini-book that we read together called "¿Qué veo?"  You can see the results here.  Mini-books are small and so the children know that they don't have to write very much.  They enjoy illustrating their work as well.  And their size also makes them ideal for the children to take home to show to their families.
• Wordle and Tagxedo: I wrote a post in April comparing all the different word cloud generators that are out there at the moment. Of all the ones I mentioned on that occasion, I use Wordle and Tagxedo the most. I find them particularly useful for displaying objectives at the beginning of a presentation (I paste in all my notes from the presentation and fortunately the words that come out biggest are the ones I want!) and also for helping pupils to see which are the important words amongst all the ones we are studying - the high-frequency core words come out biggest. Here is a Wordle of my Delicious tags (see below) and a Tagxedo of my World Cup resources page:


• Podcasting and Audacity: I've been using Audacity for a few years, but, as I discovered after a course with Joe Dale in December, only on a basic level. Joe really opened my eyes to the possibilities offered by Audacity for producing professional-sounding podcasts. I produced some secondary-level podcasts with our language assistants and then started podcasting in earnest when I undertook on behalf of the LA to provide a series of upskilling podcasts for non-specialist primary teachers of French. The technology side of it is straightforward for me now, and it's the scripting that takes the time. While I'm talking about podcasts, I'll recommend JamStudio for creating your own loops, and for making guitar accompaniments for your songs if, like me, you don't play the guitar.
• The RecorderPen: This was my purchase from the Gadget Show Live. I wrote a blog post after I had played with it for the first time and before I had used it in class. This term I have been incorporating Y1's theme of "Seaside" into their Spanish lessons. I wanted to show them how to describe things using colours. I picked four masculine sea creatures, made A5 flashcards of them, added recorded stickers and laminated the whole thing. I also made, recorded and laminated cards for 6 colours. When we were working in our groups of about 10, I said something like "un tiburón amarillo", and the children took it in turns to make the cards say the same thing by using the RecorderPen to make them speak the right words in the right order. They found it fascinating and were very interested to know how it works. Their class teacher was interested to see it and is thinking about buying a set for the class to use elsewhere in their curriculum.
• Wallwisher: Wallwisher has turned out to be very popular with my KS2 pupils. I think they like it particularly because they can see their contribution and other peoples'. It has encouraged them to engage with Spanish in their own time and, therefore, to explore the rest of the blog (see below) while they are there. One of our walls shows our collection of Spanish food nouns, something we haven't studied in class since before May half term, but which they are still adding to regularly. Our latest wall is about flags - please feel free to contribute.

• Calligrams: I've mentioned Calligrams a fair bit this year. Just see for yourself. I think I like them so much because they are a combination of words and doodles. I have also tried them out, and plan to do more in the future. What I am most chuffed about is that they have captured other peoples' imaginations too, and they are trying them with their classes. There is a place for low-tech, or, in this case, no-tech.

• Blogging: Before I started teaching in my current school, I had seen examples of effective school blogs. It was something I was very interested in setting up for the children at my school, especially as I am only there for a day and a half a week. I wanted Spanish to have a presence in the school even when I wasn't there, to publish and celebrate the good work that the children were doing, and give the children activities that they could access at home to help them with their Spanish. Fortunately, the Head agreed, and thus http://www.spanishstpauls.blogspot.com/ was born. The children love it, and are always telling me about what they have accessed on it at home. The school governors are impressed, as are some of the parents to whom I've spoken. It's also proving useful at the moment during this time of Y6-Y7 transition - the secondary teachers can see exactly what the Y6s have been doing without my having to send them loads of bits of paper.
• Google Reader: When I first started to use Twitter I was seeing a lot of links to people's blogposts. And many of them were interesting reads. Problem was that if I didn't follow the tweeted link there and then, I probably missed it. Following tips from Joe Dale and Graham Davies I started to subscribe to the blogs using Google Reader. I have the Google Reader widget displayed alongside the Gmail widget on my iGoogle, ready for my viewing and reading pleasure each morning.
• Delicious: I blogged about Delicious last August when I first discovered its usefulness for storing and tagging all the useful websites that I came across. I now have over 1000 links on my Delicious. I think now that I have it, I bookmark more sites than I used to paste into my Word document, but, more importantly, I actually use them.
• Slideshare: In my new role I do a fair bit of training, and in my continuing role on the international education side I give quite a few presentations. I used to upload some of the presentations to the website or offer to email them to interested parties. But as my presentation style is becoming more and more minimalist - more pictures, less text - the presentations were becoming less and less useful by themselves. I had followed links to other people's Slideshare presentations and was intrigued to see that some had the audio commentary attached and linked into the presentation. This seemed like an ideal way to go, especially as these slidecasts can be embedded in blogs. I've used it to share my presentations, but also to put songs onto my school blog as YouTube embeds and Podbean mp3s don't work at school. You can view all my Slideshare presentations here. Well, almost all - there are 3 that for some reason don't appear on this list but which you can see here.
• SurveyMonkey: In October last year I set about auditing Primary Languages in Sunderland. We only have 85 primary schools, but it was still an onerous task. Headteachers are busy people, and it was unrealistic to expect them all to respond to and post a paper survey. The audit needed to be short and quick and easy to complete. I had completed some surveys for the British Council which used SurveyMonkey and decided that it would be a good way of gathering the information I needed. I emailed all the HTs the link to the seven questions which it would take them about two minutes to complete. And then watched the responses flood in. Well, trickle in actually. But that's another story. SurveyMonkey proved to be easy to use and certainly preferable to having to collate and manipulate dozens of pieces of paper.
  
  My KS2s had whole-heartedly embraced Wallwisher and so I thought I would capitalise on this enthusiasm to carry out a survey via the blog. I set up a SurveyMonkey about likes and dislikes of the foods that we had been learning. There haven't been too many responses though. Partly, I think, because there were too many questions, and partly because they couldn't see their contribution straightaway on the blog. I think it's something to try again at a later date, in class maybe where the results can be seen immediately.
• Pop-ups in Dreamweaver: MFL Sunderland was 6 years old at the end of April. When I started it I was a complete website novice. Everything you see on the website and its sister sites now is something that I have learned along the way. When I was creating the interactive map for the World Cup over the Easter holidays, I knew how I wanted it to look, but didn't know how to do it. I didn't even know what the thing I wanted to do was called! Much googling and researching and experimenting and HTMLing later I achieved the effect I was after - the information for each country popped up as a little separate window which didn't obscure the main continent page. This may be small potatoes to some people, but for me it was a sense of achievement equalled only by the discovery of roll-over buttons several years ago!

And finally..... why the picture at the top ? Well, as language teachers we are all different, with different styles and with different tools at our disposal. But we are all progressing and moving forward together towards a common goal.  These are my tools at the moment.  Doubtless I will have some new ones this time next year!

Mi bandera

I thought I would share with you a sequence of lessons that has been particularly successful with my KS2s.

As you'll no doubt be aware, I gave presentations in 2006 about using the World Cup in lessons, and also produced a lot of materials. In school, however, I barely touched it with my classes. If I remember rightly, it clashed with exam and reports season.

This year, 2010, I've done the same. Given presentations, produced resources. But the big difference is of course that this time round the World Cup fitted into my sequence of lessons perfectly.

Since September I have covered some of the Y3 Intercultural Understanding objectives of the KS2 Framework, but am conscious that they are something that you have to reinforce quite frequently to embed them in the children's brains! The World Cup gave us an excellent opportunity to re-explore the countries and continents of the world and to talk about where Spanish is spoken. Then we focussed on the flags. We have done a lot of work on nouns and gender (and they understand it really well) and I wanted to start to introduce the notion of adjectival agreement.

You can download the PowerPoint for the first flag lesson here, and if you read the notes at the bottom of each slide, you can see how the language is built up. It was inspired by a workshop given by Jim McElwee at the recent NE Regional Primary Languages Conference "Read all about it Write now". Jim builds up sentences describing pictures using repetition of phrases and actions for colours and shapes. I bent his ear about it and we worked out actions for the 6 colours and the shapes. The children caught onto it very quickly and we spent a large part of the lesson speaking Spanish together to describe the flags. I used the flags of the World Cup nations to illustrate the colours and shapes, and we had some good discussions about flag colours and shapes and which flag is which.  We also discussed and worked out the rule for the agreement of the colours - why did we say "rojo" when learning the colours, but then "mi bandera es roja"?  Why doesn't "azul" change?  At the end of that first lesson, the children designed their own flags using the 6 colours (with the exception of orange, there aren't really any other colours which appear on flags) and the 5 shapes that we had been working on.

This week was the second lesson of the sequence. We revised the phrases, colours and shapes to describe the flags. Then I showed them the flags of the Spanish-speaking countries who are not in the World Cup and asked each table to work together to describe the flags. Cue lots of loud independent speaking in Spanish ! They loved trying to describe each flag as thoroughly as possible. Then they had a little time to work out how to describe their own flag, again using the structure and actions that I had introduced at the beginning.

So where to now? One of my Y6 suggested we started a new wall for our flag work. (The children at my school LOVE Wallwisher!) So I have - if you would like to contribute, please visit our school blog where you will find all the information. Your contributions would provide us with some excellent lesson material, so gracias in advance!

The main thing that I have learned from this is that actions work!  I've always been scared of them before, but now have seen the light.  Because the children are actively doing something, the repetition is more focussed and successful, and the action fixes the word more effectively in their heads.  If you want to find out more about actions in the MFL classroom, I recommend this blog post by Samantha Lunn. 

I have also learned that some little boys have an encyclopaedic knowledge of flags!

Reduce Reuse Recycle

Earlier this year I was very honoured to be asked to run a workshop at the north-east's third regional primary languages conference. This year the conference was called "Read all about it Write now!" (see what we did there?) and it focused on reading and writing in Key Stage 2. It was held today, 25th May, at Middlesbrough TLC.

My workshop was called "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" or "Adapting a model for independent writing". I thought you might like to have a look at my presentation and listen to what I had to say this morning. The slidecast is about 13 minutes long.

Reduce Reuse Recycle

View more webinars from cseccombe.

During the workshop, I got the delegates to have a go at some of the ideas. I gave them little post-its to write on, to reinforce the idea that you don't have to write a lot to be creative and to communicate successfully in another language. Here are some of the results. Most of the teachers who attended my workshop didn't know any Spanish, and so the Spanish examples show how effective writing frames via a dice roll exercise can be.

And finally, I said that I would post the link on how to make a mini-book.  My KS2s' mini-books can be viewed here.

Clouds of Words

One of my biggest regrets, educationally speaking, is opting to do Chemistry instead of Art for O'level.  I didn't understand much of the Chemistry and remain a frustrated artist.  Therefore I'm delighted that one of the best things that I have discovered via Twitter is the ability to make word clouds, as these display my very favourite things - words - in an artistic and useful way.

There are now quite a few different ways of making word clouds, so I thought I would show you here what they can do.

To make comparison easier, the words in all the clouds are from this blog.

WORDLE
First, the word cloud generator that people are probably most familiar with - Wordle:

I entered the URL of this blog, clicked on "Submit", and this is the group of words that I got.  I then chose a font, set all the words to lie horizontally and created my own colour scheme.  It looks as though Wordle has only used the most recent posts to make its cloud.  The biggest words are the ones which appear most in the blog.  It has discounted the most common English words, and this is a function that is available for other languages too.  Wordle is very easy to use, but you can only save your resulting wordcloud by doing a screen capture.

WordItOut
Another one that I have tried is WordItOut:

WordItOut works in a similar way to Wordle, but always puts the biggest, and therefore most common, words in the centre.  The WordItOut image has used the whole blog.

WordSift
To make a WordSift image, you paste in some text.  I used the most recent of my blogposts about the food flags:

Once it has made your wordcloud, WordSift invites you to sort your words in different ways.  The above image is an A-Z sort, and the one below is 'common to rare':

Once you have your word cloud, you can click on the individual words and WordSift will show you Google images for that word and you can also see that word in a Visual Thesaurus.  The Google images part works for text in other languages, but the Thesaurus does not.

TAGUL
Tagul creates word clouds in the same way as Wordle, but something you will have to do is to "blacklist" the most common English words to create the most useful result.  (My most common words came out as "they" and "then"!)  The big difference with Tagul is that each of the words in your cloud is linked to a Google search.  I think that this function is useful for word clouds of blogs, websites, or presentations, so that readers can click to find out more about certain things.  You can also embed your Taguls:

IMAGECHEF
The size of the Imagechef Word Mosaic means that you can only put in a small number of words, but in many ways this is ideal for use with students, especially beginners or the less able who find independent writing a daunting prospect.  You can make your own symbols and colour combinations, and then embed the results:



TAGXEDO
And finally, the new kid on the block, Tagxedo, which has caused much excitement on Twitter this week.  Tagxedo offers many different fonts and colour combinations, as well as different options for the direction of your words and for saving your word clouds afterwards.  But the main innovation and something that sets it apart is the function which allows you to change the shape of your wordcloud.  There are nine different shapes to choose from in the program, or you can import your own shapes.  Another bonus is the option to create your wordcloud in the shape of a word:

It's all very well to be able to make these beautiful wordclouds, but what's the point, apart from pure creativity ?  How can we use them in the classroom, and what is the value of students creating their own ?  The Twitterati have come up with lots of good ideas.  Here are the links to their blog posts:

Samantha Lunn  23 ways to use Wordle in the MFL classroom 

Richard Byrne  More Wordle in the Classroom Ideas

Joe Dale  Using Wordle in the Classroom

And here is a cool trick which will help you to put phrases into Wordle rather than just single words.

Of course it goes without saying that these ideas can be adapted for the other word cloud generators.

Clouds of words, pieces of art.