Flash Forward

The premise of the American TV series FlashForward is that everyone on the planet (well, nearly everyone) simultaneously loses consciousness and experiences a blackout of two minutes and seventeen seconds.  During this blackout they have a vision of their life six months from that point.  The characters spend the series trying to come to terms with and to understand what they have seen in their "flash forward", and to discover who or what is responsible for it.

"Flash Forward" is also the title of an article in last Friday's TES magazine about MFL teachers who are using Web 2.0 and social networking in their work.  I was extremely flattered to be interviewed for the article by its author, Yojana Sharma.  I spoke to her for about 45 minutes about the tools that I have been using, about my websites and about my school blog.    And I am equally honoured to be mentioned on the same page as Joe Dale, Isabelle Jones, Suzi Bewell, Chris Harte, Helena Butterfield, Alex Blagona, José Picardo, Jo Rhys-Jones and Lisa Stevens.  The article is very positive, and makes it clear that what we are doing has not been imposed by the DCSF or any other agency.  It is grass roots - real teachers finding things that work and sharing them.  I'm proud to be a part of it.

I sent the link to the article to my line manager.  Part of his reply read "It's really pleasing to see that you are at the forefront of new technology use.  What can we do to share this practice further in Sunderland ?"

Interesting question.  If I were to put on a training session next week for language teachers, in particular secondary language teachers, they would either smile and nod politely and then forget all about it, or go back to school all fired up with new ideas and find that all the important websites were blocked.  I don't think that there is any one easy solution to this problem of getting more teachers on board, so why bother ?  Well, we are ceaselessly trying to show our students that knowledge of another language is an important skill for the modern world and for the future world.  So we need to present it in a modern way which looks to this future world, and which speaks to the students in their language, the language of the digital native.

So, now to more thinking about parallels between FlashForward the TV series and Flash Forward the article.......

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.

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.

Primary Languages Show 2010

Last night at 8.30pm I arrived home after driving back from the Primary Languages Show, which started at the ACC in Liverpool yesterday, 12th March, and continues today, 13th March.  Despite a 3.5 hour journey and White Van Man trying to drive me off the road on the M62, I was still buzzing with the presentations that I had seen and the ideas they had given me.

The day began with an introduction from Therese Comfort from CILT, and a keynote address from Dr Dan Tierney, who spoke about his philosophy for Primary Languages and research that he has been carrying out.

The first workshop I attended was Language Upskilling, led by Carmel O'Hagan from CILT.  I wasn't able to attend the meeting about this in Newcastle last week, and so used this as an opportunity to learn about the new specification for Upskilling for primary teachers.  We have identified Upskilling as a training need in Sunderland, and it was useful to gain an insight into the new specification.

After this workshop, I walked briskly round to the other side of the ACC, hoping to catch Helen Myers, who had been leading a workshop and with whom I have been corresponding virtually for many years.  Despite texting each other with what we were wearing (!) and our locations in the building, we missed each other.  We'll meet one day, Helen !  It was just after this that I bumped into Joe Dale, with whom I enjoyed coffee, and lunch later on.  Speaking of virtual friends who I finally got to meet, I had a long chat with Martin Lapworth of Task Magic fame, Jan Lewandowski, who said some very nice things about MFL Sunderland, and I finally got to meet Lisa Stevens.  I also caught up with fellow north-easterner Steve Mulgrew, who was showing off his new primary French materials.

The second workshop I went to was "Exploring non-fiction: All about animals", presented by Louise Harty, languages adviser for Northumberland.  She took us through the sequence of activities for the latest materials from Northumberland - "Tout à propos des Animaux".  It is a series of thinking skills lessons which enables pupils to discover and manipulate both basic and more complex French.  It's aimed Y6 and Y7 and would make an excellent transition unit.  It would give those Y7s who have done French before a new focus and some new challenges, while enabling those new to the language to find out about gender, adjectival agreement, regular verb paradigms....  I really enjoyed Louise's presentation, and being able to actually do all the activities !

After lunch (a tasty chicken tagine) I went to "Podcasting to upskill primary teachers", presented by Phil Wood from Lancashire LA.  He described the programme of podcasts that they have made to help classroom teachers to become more confident in their use of French and in their MFL teaching methodology.  Primary teachers are able to study in small, 5-minute chunks in their own time and at their own pace.  Sunderland teachers are very keen to have some help with their own skills in French, and I am very interested in looking at this as a way forward.  It would certainly be pretty easy for me to put together using the sound files that we already have on MFL Sunderland and which were recorded by our FLAs.  Anything is easier than trying to get them all in the same room at the same time, and we are a much smaller LA than Lancashire !

I finished my day with "La main dans la bouche - using puppets for teaching French", which was presented by Stephen Novy.  We found out how to make basic rod and sock puppets, and how best to operate them so as to make them the focus of the lesson.  I use a puppet with Reception and Nursery, and I got some good ideas for how to use him and develop his character.

I had a fantastic time at the Primary Languages Show, and am looking forward to trying out all the new things I learnt and saw.  Next year I will have to save up and go for both days !

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!)