Language World 2024 #LW2024

 

"Language World" by Pixlr AI Image Generator 

Yesterday I returned from ALL's annual conference, Language World, which this year was held in Kenilworth in Warwickshire.  That's a good four-hour drive from here in the north-east, but it's always worth it for the content and for seeing old friends and meeting new ones.  I only attended one of the two days this year due to a family birthday, but of course it was worth it.

Here are the sketchnotes that I made from some of the sessions that I went to.  I'm afraid the scanning has gone a bit wonky with some of them!  I spoke about Dictation, and will post about that separately.

By the way, if you are wondering about the image at the top of this post, inspired by the theme of AI at Language World, I asked the Pixlr AI Image Generator to create a "Language World" image.  As you can see, it needs work!

Language Education in an AI enabled world: the challenges, the opportunity and the future
Prof. Kate Borthwick

University Challenge: how working cross-phase can provide support and capacity to raise aspiration and develop learning outside the classroom
Jane Driver and Sarah Schechter

Translation: the key to growing flexible, imaginative linguists
Jess Beeton

Cognitive Science in the language classroom and learning language through images and physical representation
Saleh Patel

Promoting International Links: a practical guide
Lisa Stevens

Possibilities and practicalities of ChatGPT in languages teaching and learning
Joe Dale

Language World 2021: sketchnotes

 

This year's Language World was an all-online affair, which made the feel a bit different, but the sessions were of just as good a quality.  Here are my sketchnotes from the sessions that I attended:

Turn that frown upside down: practical tips to motivate learners in Key Stage 3 and beyond
Claire Wilson

British Council Language Trends 2021 - interim results
Vicky Gough and Ian Collen

The 20 Keys: Giving Grammar a new lease of life
Elena Díaz

Using CLIL and MFL strategies to maximise the curriculum for EAL learners
Jane Driver

International Partnerships and Exchanges
Vicky Gough and Brian Stobie

Multilingualism, language learning and social cognition
Professor Li Wei

Language learning: Learning from the past
Professor Nicola McLelland, Dr Simon Coffey, Dr Lina Fisher

A rich curriculum for all: the pressured yet pivotal position of languages
Dr Michael Wardle, HMI

The missing link: transition between KS2 and KS3
Suzanne O'Farrell, ASCL

Challenges and rewards in the CLIL unit design process
Dr Marie Petersen

Making connections between languages with translation skills for easier KS2-KS3 transition
Helen Stokes

Erasmus+

From January 1st 2014 Erasmus+ will become the new EU funding programme for education, training, youth and sport.  It replaces Comenius, Leonardo, Erasmus, Grundtvig and Transversal as well as other smaller programmes.

Last week I went to a briefing session which was run by Europe Direct Northeast.  Here are the main points.

Erasmus+ has a new and different approach to that of the old programmes.  Europe is a changed and changing place, and it needs to become more competitive in the face of the new economies of South America and Asia.  Priorities are different.

The new programme is much simplified.  It is more user-friendly and easier to navigate (not difficult, if you have experience of filling in Comenius application forms!)  There is also a substantial budget increase of 40% to €40.8 billion over seven years.

These are the objectives of the programme, against which project applications will be scored:

• improve the level of key competences and skills (especially literacy, numeracy and ICT)
• foster quality improvements, innovation excellence and internationalisation at the level of education and training institutions
• promote European lifelong learning
• enhance the international dimension of education and training
• improve the teaching and learning of languages (a real bonus for the MFL community!)

Amongst the opportunities for individuals, across the EU 800,000 lecturers, teachers, trainers and education staff and youth workers will be able to teach or train abroad.  500,000 young people will be able to volunteer abroad and take part in youth exchanges.

Key Action 1 relates to the Learning mobility of school staff.  The aims are to develop school staff competences, such as languages and ICT, and to offer professional development opportunities abroad.  The application procedure has changed.  In the past, schools completed their own applications and delivered them to the national agency by the given deadline.  Now, schools will need to register with the programme and then formulate a strategic two-year international plan.  Then they apply for opportunities as and when they come up.  The approach, therefore, is now strategic and institutional, and is no longer an opportunity for personal enrichment.  It must be whole-school. 

There are opportunities for innovation projects and the exchange of good practice.  There is funding for 25,000 partnerships involving 125,000 institutions (which works out at about 5 partners per partnership) to share best practice, enhance basic skills and to keep children engaged with their learning.  Cross-phase and cross-sector partnerships are encouraged.

eTwinning will take on an enhanced role, with an expected 200,000 teachers collaborating online.  Money will be spent redeveloping eTwinning, and more use will be encouraged.  It will aim to provide a stronger platform for cooperation between schools and will support all kinds of school cooperation and mobility.  

Key Action 2 is for Strategic Partnerships.  They aim to develop and implement practices and tools, as well as an exchange of experience and good practice.  The funding deadline will probably be March. Successful applications will show transferability of knowledge within partnerships, a clear sense of European identity and an introduction of languages, and will not be just a transfer of materials.  If a partnership wishes to meet in one of the partner countries, they will have to demonstrate why they have to meet physically and not online.  The meeting will have to lead to something specific.  Again, the application procedure is different.  In partnerships of just schools, only one application needs to be submitted, by the co-ordinating school.  Then the whole partnership will be approved by the co-ordinator's national agency - whole partnerships are selected.  This will solve the problem that Comenius school partnerships have had in recent years, where each school applied separately to their national agencies and were approved or not at national level.  Partnerships often collapsed when not enough partners were approved by their own national agencies.  Partnerships will receive a fixed amount of Euros regardless of where the partners are, and will be based on the number of organisations in the partnership.

Sadly, Comenius Language Assistants and Partner-finding seminars are not a part of Erasmus+.

Keep an eye on the website erasmusplus.org.uk as well as the Twitter hashtag #erasmusplusuk.

Using Web2.0 tools to promote reading

Today I gave a presentation at this year's Atlas conference in Durham - "The International School - Promoting the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of global learners".  I gave some ideas for using Web2.0 tools to promote and facilitate reading.  The context was for reading within a partnership with schools overseas, but of course the tools that I have highlighted can be used across the curriculum and not just for reading.  Here is the presentation:

using Web2.0 tools to promote and facilitate reading

View more PowerPoint from Clare Seccombe

I haven't got a bean

We have a rule in our house:  the person who doesn't cook the tea has to wash up.  Today I wasn't quite quick enough off the mark, and the sausages, potato wedges and beans were cooked by my husband.  So while the children were upstairs "brushing their teeth" it fell to me to do the washing up.  To keep me company I turned on the radio, choosing Radio 2 and Simon Mayo.  


If you're a regular listener to Simon Mayo's programme, you'll know that every evening each member of the team prepares a quiz question based on sport, business and financial affairs or general trivia.  Today the question posed by Simon himself went along the lines of "In Mexico in Aztec times, cocoa beans were used as currency.  If a turkey cost 100 cocoa beans, what could you get for 3 beans?  Was it (a) an avocado (b) a wife or (c) a tomato?"  The two other members of the team, with much giggling, pleaded for it to be answer b, and were disappointed when it turned out to be answer a.


There I was, washing the pots and pans, thinking "What a neat idea to use when you're teaching numbers in Spanish!"


I've had a little look around the old Internet, and have found out the following info:


The Aztecs were using cocoa beans as currency when the Spaniards first arrived, and continued to do so until as late as 1858.  An Aztec document from 1545 gives a list of what you could buy for your beans.


1 small rabbit - 30 beans
1 turkey egg - 3 beans
1 large tomato - 1 bean
1 slave - 100 beans
1 male turkey - 300 beans
1 female turkey - 100 beans
1 newly picked avocado - 3 beans
1 fully ripe avocado - 1 bean
20 small tomatoes - 1 bean
5 long green chili peppers - 1 bean
1 large strip of pine bark for kindling - 5 beans
And finally (maybe not one to share with KS2) the services of 1 prostitute - 10 beans


Cocoa beans were small change.  For your bigger purchases you would need mantles (capes or cloaks), copper axe blades or quills of gold dust.  1 cotton cape would set you back 300 beans.  A string of jade beans would cost you 600 capes.  How many beans is that?


There are lots of possibilities here for some number work in the foreign language using the beans exchange rate.  For example:
¿Cuántos granos de cacao para dos conejos? 
Tengo veinte granos de cacao.  ¿Cuántos huevos de pavo puedo comprar?


There is also plenty of opportunity for intercultural work.  How many of the children will know that chocolate, tomatoes, avocados and turkeys come from the Americas?  And of course they can find out more about the Aztecs.  I've found the Aztecs pages of the Mexicolore site interesting and am going to have another scout around it to see what I can find.


My next-year's-Y3 have already done two years of Spanish with me, and know the numbers 1-15 well.  This will give me a good way to revise them without being repetitive.


Getting an international dimension into Numeracy and Maths was already in my mind after someone tweeted a link to this blog post about "McDonald's Menu Items From Around The World" yesterday.  You can learn a lot about different countries and cultures from their McDonald's menu, and of course it's something that our students know all about.  I've looked at other countries' McDonald's menus before, and my ideas for using the information in schemes of work formed part of a presentation I gave to local headteachers a few years ago.  If you would like to have a look at the presentation, you'll find it here.


UPDATE 11.8.11
I've just purchased this book as part of my ever-increasing library of intercultural materials.  It refers to the cocoa-bean currency and suggests getting children to draw up their own system of currency using foods, counters or other classroom materials like pens and pencils.  They can say, for example, that a red counter is worth 1p or that a pencil is worth €1, and work out how much they would charge in their new currency for groceries, clothes, toys or magazines.  There is nothing to stop them doing this work in another language.


I have also created a worksheet for Primary Spanish practising numbers and using cocoa beans, and you can download it here.

The Birth of a Nation

I have been following with interest over the last few days the news coverage of the beginnings of the Republic of South Sudan.  It was this BBC news article which first captured my attention.  It talks about all the things that the new nation will have had to sort out in advance of its official "birth" yesterday, such as its political border, its flag, stamps, currency and its country-level internet domain.  South Sudan had an X-Factor style competition for its new national anthem.


It struck me that this would make a good school project.  Tell the children that your region - the north-east in my case - has decided to become an independent state.  They have to decide on its capital city (Newcastle?  Sunderland?  Durham?  Controversial!), a flag, currency and so on.  What they choose will depend on the cultural identity and heritage of where they live.  This could also work in language lessons.  Instead of their own region, you could choose a region of one of the target-language countries.  For example, tell them that Castilla y León is going to become an independent state.  They will have to do some research to find out more about it if they are going to create a meaningful profile for it.  And then of course they can practise their presentation skills by introducing their new country to the rest of the class.


Just an idea.

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.

Food flags, informative flags

I always check my Tweets while I'm having my breakfast in the morning.  This morning there was one in particular which caught my eye:

Last year's Sydney International Food Festival was promoted with these wonderful images of national flags made up of their country's iconic foods.  Here is a copy of the poster, which you can download as an A3 or A4 PDF here. 

You may know by now that I am passionate about international education, in particular about getting people to see past stereotypes and find the "real" people and countries in the world.  These flags seem like an excellent place to start.

Esther Mercier (the genius behind A tantôt) suggests giving the pictures to Food Technology teachers so that they can join in European Day of Languages.  Students can research which flag is portrayed each time, and which foods are used to make them.  They could then have a go at making their own flags for other countries.  This links in nicely with the World Cup as well.  While pupils are finding out about the 31 teams who aren't England, they could research the typical foods of the countries and have a go at representing them pictorially like this.

But why stop at food ?  There are all sort of images and indeed words that could be represented as flags.

Here is a Spanish flag I made using MS Publisher.  Is it the truth or is it stereotype ?

And here is a French flag represented as a Calligram that I made using Imagechef and Publisher.  Students could do the writing themselves.

There are many possibilities.  If you're not averse to a bit of mess in your classroom, get some travel brochures and get the students to make some mosaic flags with images of the chosen country.  Whichever method you choose, they will certainly make for an eye-catching display.

One flag that is missing from the Sydney poster is ours.  What foods would your students put on a pictorial representation of our flag ?  Why ?  What other images would they put on our flag to represent our country.  They are obliged to think about their own country and its identity.  Community cohesion.

My favourite websites

I was honoured to be invited to Gosforth High School in Newcastle this afternoon to tell ALL NE (the north-east branch of the Association of Language Learning) about my favourite websites.

I had an hour and a half.  The question was not what to include, but rather what to leave out !  I could have spoken for a lot longer.  As it was I didn't get the chance to show all of the sites.

I hummed and haa-ed a lot beforehand about how best to present the information.  PowerPoint would mean a lot of chopping and changing, opening and closing, stopping and starting.  Eventually I decided on presenting my favourite websites as a website.  You can find it here.

Click on the words on the computer screen to see the categories.  Then click on the thumbnails to link to the sites.  (I hope you can see my computer background on the main page!)

World Cup Calligrams

Combining ideas for bringing the World Cup into your classroom and my love of calligrams:

World Cup Calligrams

View more presentations from cseccombe.

I found a football colouring sheet and lightened the lines to pale grey using PaintShop Pro. Braver people could draw their own in pencil ! Then I filled in each section with words about England and being English. These are the images that you can see on the slides.

Suggestions for using this in the classroom:

• Show pupils the images and ask them to read what is written in each section. Why have these words been chosen ? This makes them think about their own country and the things that typify it - community cohesion !
• Pupils then research another of the World Cup countries, finding out similar information.
• Pupils either draw their own footballer or find a suitable colouring sheet and represent their findings as a calligram. It's even better if they use the country's national colours.
• For a MFL twist, pupils can present their findings in their foreign language or even in the country's language !

We are multicolored

"Join Twitter, it's really good."
"It's the best CPD you'll ever have."
"I find it incredibly useful."

In April some esteemed TESsers were muttering about the wonders of Twitter. In a moment of idle curiosity I registered and had a look around, but honestly failed to see the point. The TESsers persisted, tracking me down and following me.

It didn't take long for me to become totally hooked. Each day I receive interesting information from those I follow. For example, today I received a link to Free Technology for Teachers, which looks like just my kind of website. I had a peruse of the MFL links, and came across something that is definitely my kind of site - We are multicolored.



In my World Cup 2010 presentation (see previous post), one of my ideas for using the flags of the qualifying nations was for pupils to research the colours and symbols used in flags and then design a flag to represent themselves.

"We are multicolored" is a website that will help them to do just that. The site is the brainchild of some of the digital artists at the Tenement Museum in New York, which aims to "promote awareness around the contemporary immigrant experience".

There are two main areas of the site. If you click on "symbolism", you can browse the flags of the world and the colours and shapes that they use, and find out the meanings behind them. Then on the homepage you have the opportunity to create your own flag by answering three simple questions:

• where is your home ?
• what other country has affected you ?
• where have you dreamed of going ?

Then you are given the three flags of the countries you have chosen, and you can click and drag their individual elements to make your own personal flag. As you do so, you are shown information about the flags. When you have finished your flag, you can save it to the site and write an explanation of why you designed it that way. Clicking on "superflag" brings up all the flags that others have made and their explanations. There is also a downloadable 45 minute workshop available.

Here's the flag that I made with my three choices - United Kingdom, Spain and New Zealand.

It gets pupils to think about where they come from, where they have been and where they would like to go. Community Cohesion ! Enjoy.

The 2010 World Cup

So you might be wondering what the 2010 World Cup has to do with the blog title "Changing Phase". Well, football up here in the north-east is certainly changing phase, with Sunderland being the only north-east team still in the Premiership. Who would have thought it ?!

Today I attended the annual Atlas conference at St James Park in Newcastle. Atlas is the name of the steering group of the north-east branch of the Regional Network for International Learning, and I have been the Sunderland representative since I became an AST in 2002. The title of the conference this year was "Ready, set, go global! - developing international links to enrich school life", and had a particular focus on forthcoming sporting events, in particular the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 Olympics, and how they might help us as classroom practitioners to bring an international dimension to our teaching and therefore to pupils' learning.

I "volunteered" to give a presentation on the 2010 World Cup and how it can be used as a stimulus for activities in the primary classroom. We ran an event in Sunderland in 2006 called "Making the most of the World Cup" which produced many resources and which was very successful. The World Cup resources page on the LA's international website continues to receive a number of hits even though the tournament is long over.

When putting together my presentation, I looked at the resources that we produced for the 2006 tournament for a bit of inspiration, but based my presentation on the official Fifa World Cup website, which is a mine of fantastically useful information and well worth a look.

I hope you enjoy the presentation. It's my first go with Slideshare, and especially my first go at linking audio with PowerPoint. I hope also that it gives you lots of ideas for how you can bring the world into your classroom. After 12 years, 4 Comenius projects and 3 International School Awards, international education is something that I am passionate about. This is the latest step in my mission to enthuse as many other people as possible !

World Cup 2010 - activities for the primary classroom

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