Light Bulb Languages resources moving forward

Over the last couple of weeks I have had a couple of surveys open to find out what kind of resources language teachers would like to see on Light Bulb Languages.  I had one survey for primary and another for secondary.  Today I have been collating the results so that I can see what I need to focus on from now on.  I'm sharing the findings here and signposting some resources that are already on the website.

Primary teachers would like:

• resources linked to traditional songs
• resources for daily routine
• resources about school
• resources for telling the time:  There are French time resources here and Spanish here.
• dictionary lessons
• listening resources:  Have a look at the LiPS Listening Project
• short stories with activities
• reading comprehensions, fiction and non-fiction
• retrieval resources
• sentence builders:  The majority of the units in the French scheme of work and all the unit in the Spanish schemes of work have sentence builders to accompany them.
• cover lessons that fit in with the commonly taught topics
• resources for younger learners in nursery and reception

I also asked if there were any special days or festivals that they would like resources for:

• European Day of Languages: I have recently published a pack of 40 activities for European Day of Languages.
• Christmas:  There are Christmas activities for French, Spanish and German already on the website.
• Journée internationale de la Francophonie
• Easter: There are already some French Easter resources here and Spanish here.
• Mother's Day
• 14 juillet (Bastille Day): I have blogged about this but as yet have not created any resources
• Sporting events throughout the year
• Chandeleur
• Fête des Rois
• Día de los Muertos: There are some resources here already, but not many.  I didn't teach it as both my schools were Church of England.
• International Mother Tongue Day
• Cultural events in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
• resources for Karneval
• resources for fiestas in Spanish America

In the "anything else" section, one teacher asked if I could arrange the resources in each unit in the French scheme of work in the same way as in the Spanish.  Of course I will do that.  By the way, all the scheme of work documents for the French scheme are now complete.

Now moving on to secondary.

As far as text books are concerned, there was a wide range of books being used, with some schools not using a text book:

• AQA GCSE
• Zoom
• Allez
• Studio  
• Viva 
• Mira
• Edexcel GCSE
• Stimmt
• Echt
• Kerboodle
• Dynamo
• Sentence Builders Trilogy
• Amici

Secondary teachers would like:

• Games
• Sentence builders: For Studio 1 there are resources here and sentence builders here. 
  There are also Studio 2 Rouge resources here, Studio 2 Rouge sentence builders here, Studio 3 Rouge sentence builders here and some Studio 3 Vert sentence builders here. 
  There are Viva 1 sentence builders here and resources for Mira 1 here.
• GCSE exam support
• Listening resources
• Catchy but not childish songs: There are a number of songs in French and Spanish on the Light Bulb Languages YouTube channel.
• KS3/KS4 cover lessons with marking key
• News stories about the UK as reported in other countries where the languages are spoken
• speaking games
• cultural grammar activities
• GCSE German writing practice
• Phonics and phonics games
• puzzles suitable for KS3
• authentic resources for higher students to push them to grades 7/8/9
• reading comprehension activities

They would also like resources for these special days and festivals:

• non-European festivals such as Eid in Morocco
• St Martin's Day
• Poisson d'avril
• Tour de France: I have blogged about the Tour but haven't created any resources yet.
• European Day of Languages: I have recently published a pack of 40 activities for European Day of Languages.
• Christmas: There are Christmas activities for French, Spanish and German already on the website.
• Fête des Rois
• Día de los Muertos: There are some resources here already, but not many.  I didn't teach it as both my schools were Church of England.
• Cinco de Mayo
• La Tomatina
• Feria de abril
• Journée internationale de la Francophonie
• sporting events
• Reyes: There are a number of Reyes resources in the Spanish Christmas resources.
• El Colacho
• fiestas from Spanish-speaking America

In the "anything else" section, one teachers asked for a list of different activities to use in the classroom.  Have a look at Adaptable Activities for your Language Lessons.

Thank you very much to everyone who took the time to respond to the survey.  Your responses have given me plenty to go on.  There are some things that I already have on my list but some which I hadn't thought of.  

Something else that I have planned is a major redesign of the website, which will take some time.  A dilemma that I have currently is whether or not to keep the website free.  I've now retired from the classroom, so my main source of income is no more.  The website makes very little money, as all its income is from Google Ads.  I'm also aware that some of the resources on the site are not mine.  Any constructive comments about this or about resources are welcome.

Here's wishing you all the best of luck for the forthcoming academic year.  I will try to support you as best I can.

Sentencify.net

 

Yesterday I was browsing posts on the Secondary MFL Matters Facebook group, and saw a reference to the website sentencify.net, which can be used to generate sentences and retrieval activities from a sentence builder.  (Thanks Marissa!)

I've had a play with it this morning (up early as daughter #1 had an early shift at work!) to see what it does.

First of all, you click on the "Get started" button, and this takes you to your "sentence builder" grid.  I entered some simple pets sentences:

There are 10 boxes altogether to structure your sentences.  The next step is to click the "Generate sentences" button, and choose how many sentences you'd like sentencify to generate for you.  I chose 8.

Then you need to type in the English (L2) for the sentences generated.  The sentencify user guide suggests copying and pasting into an online translator as a short cut - I pasted mine into Google Translate (ssshhhh!) and then just had to change turtle to tortoise.

Once you have your sentences in the L1 and L2, click on "Generate activities" for the options for the retrieval activities.

The first is the Match Up:

The activity is designed to be completed online, but it would also be possible to copy and paste into your paper-based activity or PowerPoint.

The second activity is "Unjumble":

The original L1 sentences are jumbled up and students have to rewrite them in the correct order.  It's worth noting here that the program wants the sentences to have the format of the singular pet followed by the plural pets, but grammatically speaking the order could also be the reverse of that.  This is something that you may want to consider when designing your sentences, especially if you are going to ask students to complete them online.

The third activity is "Fill the gaps":

and the fourth is "Translate":

The final activity is "Drag and drop":

To be honest I'm not entirely sure of the aim of this activity.  Each one I generate turns out in a different format!  If you have used the drag and drop, it'd be great if you could say in the comments how you've used it.

At the top of the screen there is also a "Create a test" button.  You can generate a test where students have to translate either L1 sentences to L2, or L2 to L1.  

Once you have finished your sentence builder and sentences, it's possible to save them, but remember to copy the code that is generated for your activity, as you'll need to enter this to open it again.

There is also a function for entering impossible sentences into the sentence builder and using hashtags to clarify which words can go together:

I had a go with this, and it takes a bit of trial and error to get enough variation in the sentences:

Finally, it's also possible to put emojis into your sentences.  I saw this on the sentencify Twitter account.  I didn't know before that pressing the Windows logo key and the full stop together brings up an emoji menu!

The resulting "sentences" will be more useful for some of the activities than for others.

I enjoyed exploring the site and can see how it will be useful in particular for generating quickly and easily lots of sentences from a sentence builder, as well as retrieval activities.  Have a play and see what you think!

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!

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!

Copyright

A little word about copyright, if I may.

In 2004, I uploaded for the first time a languages resource website called MFL Sunderland (you may have heard of it).  It contained 99% of the language resources I have ever made.  Then, in April 2014, MFL Sunderland ceased to exist, and I moved its content to a new site, Light Bulb Languages.  It continues to contain 99% of the resources I have ever made, as well as a number of resources that have been donated by kind and generous users.

All the resources are available to users free of charge, but they are not copyright-free.  Every resource has a copyright statement giving the website name, the URL, the year it was made and the name or initials of the person who made it.

This afternoon I have, once more, found copies of my own resources available on TES Resources.  And the user offering them is not me.  In this instance, the resources are being offered for free, and so I have left blunt reviews on each of them detailing their provenance, and also giving links to the originals.  A few months ago, I received a message from a user to say that they had seen resources of mine being offered for sale on TES Resources.  Sure enough, many of my resources were there, with my copyright statements still on them in most cases, being sold on TES Resources, by one user.  I reported it to TES, the resources were taken down and the user has since deleted that account.

Neither of these cases is an isolated incident.  Neither is TES Resources the only guilty site, but it is the main one.  Neither is this problem confined to language teachers - I have been corresponding today with an English teacher who has had the same thing happen to them.

This is wrong.  Why should other teachers make a profit out of my work that I offer to them for free?  Why should other teachers get the praise and the nice comments, when it's my work?  It's wrong, and it's theft.

So this is my way of saying PLEASE respect other peoples' copyright.  Think about how it makes the original authors feel to find their hard work being plagiarised.

Thanks for reading.

For your reference, the Light Bulb Languages copyright statement is here.

Mundo Primaria

While looking for something else yesterday, I found Mundo Primaria.  It's a website intended for Spanish children, but has plenty to offer us as teachers of Spanish, both in primary and secondary.

Here are my favourite pages:

• Chistes cortos para niños  At Language World, Glennis Pye recommended jokes as good short texts for translation.  This page has a slide show of 25 jokes.
  
  
• Lecturas cortas  These texts too would be good for translation, particularly the non-fiction ones.  El Sol is among the texts that would also be useful for reading in Key Stage 2.
  
• Cuentos infantiles cortos  Lots of short stories of different genres.
  
• Infografías educativas  The first ones are for English, but look further down the list and there are some good word mats for maths and the solar system.  I particularly like this food pyramid one.
  
• Ejercicios de ciencias sociales  Downloadable worksheets for social sciences.  The geography ones are to do with the map of Spain (which is what I was looking for originally!) and even if you don't use the exact resource it will give you some ideas for teaching the geography of Spain.  The Vida en sociedad and Historia worksheets are also useful for cross-curricular learning in Key Stage 2 and even Key Stage 3.
  
• Ejercicios de lengua  Worksheets that provide useful ideas for teaching grammar, especially in Key Stage 2.
  
• Números naturales hasta el millar  These maths worksheets would be useful for any student learning big numbers in Spanish.
  
• El Euro  Some useful adding-up-money sheets  (The rest of the maths sheets can be accessed from here.)

Pictotraductor

A few years ago I discovered Pictotraductor, a Spanish website which allows you to create pictorial representations of Spanish sentences.  The resulting sentences make excellent decoding activities.  I like to give them to the children in mixed-ability pairs, where the children take it in turns to write, and each writes in a different colour so that you can see who did what. (This is a collaborative, Kagan-style activity.)

For example, can you work out what these sentences are saying?

I like to leave out the definite and indefinite articles for added difficulty!  These just appear as words in the squares:

I have been using it to prepare some sentences about opinions of sports for my Year 5 class, but found that there was no symbol for me encanta.  If you click on "Login" at the bottom of the screen, you can create an account and upload your own images.  So I now I have an image for me encanta:

If you click on "Funcionamiento" at the bottom of the page, there are some useful tips on making Pictotraductor work for you.  For example, if you put "no-" before a word, the picture will appear with a red cross through it.

Pictotraductor is only available in Spanish, but if you know a little bit of Spanish you can make it work for other languages too.

I contacted the people at Pictoaplicaciones (they are based near Santiago de Compostela) and they are happy for me to use and share their images in resources.

If you click on "Una idea" at the bottom of the screen, you'll find the other applications offered by Pictoaplicaciones.  I like Pictosonidos, which lets you hear the word and see it included in a sentence.  You can also play a guessing game with the words (click on "Jugar" under one of the pictures).  There is a minibeast one which I'd like to use with Year 1.  Also of interest is Pictocuentos, which tells and illustrates well-known stories.

Have a play with it and see what you think!

Another new phase

1st September 2011 is the beginning of a new phase in my professional life.  For sixteen years, from being an NQT, I worked for Sunderland Local Authority.  Now I don't.  The local authority will no longer receive the money that paid for me to be the advisory teacher for Primary Languages, and in these times of cuts the role has been deleted.

Now I will be teaching Primary Spanish in one school and Primary French in another, and that will take care of 2.5 days each week.  I would like to spend some of the remainder of my time training, speaking and consulting, something which I started last year.  To this end I have set up my own company.  And for the first time, despite my years of web experience, I have purchased a domain name and paid for web hosting.  So if you would like to see what I do and have done, please click on www.ideaseducation.co.uk.  You can contact me via the same site.

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!

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!)

Making the link - it's Delicious !

In my line of work, "Making the link" is all about finding partner schools in the UK or overseas with whom you're going to work collaboratively. Here, however, it's going to take on a different meaning.

I check emails, tweets and forums several times a day (or often more than several times!). There are lots of helpful people out there who pass on lots uf useful stuff. Towards the end of last term, I started to find a lot of new websites that I wanted to keep to refer to later, and started to copy and paste the URLs into a Word document called "read this!" which I kept on my desktop. A few days ago I noticed that this document was 9 pages long. I knew that I had to do something with this list of websites but wasn't exactly sure what.

Then yesterday I clicked on a link on one of the forums which led to someone's Delicious links. Delicious is something I'd been aware of before but which I had ignored as I didn't see the point at the time. Yesterday, though, I quickly realised that this would be an ideal tool to use to sort out my many pages of useful websites.

So what is Delicious ? "Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source." So it's an extension of the process of adding bookmarks to your individual computer when you're surfing the net.

Signing up was a piece of cake, and I also installed the Internet Explorer toolbar, which makes adding links very easy. So much easier than pasting into Word, and I can access my links from anywhere with an internet link ! I think the most useful thing is the tags, which allow you to search your many links quickly and easily.

You can see my links so far here. I'd be very interested to hear from folks who have been using this for a while, especially if you have been using it for more than just a storage point for the links that you've found. I know that this is old hat to a lot of people, but I figured that if it's new for me, it'll be new for others too.