MFL Show and Tell York 3 #mflsaty3

Yesterday I attended the third MFL Show and Tell at York University.

It was organised by Suzi Bewell in association with ALL and sponsored by Vocab Express, Sanako, Toshiba, Sonocent, Goethe Institut, Mantra Lingua, Little Linguist, Learning French with camembear, art of brilliance, Routes into Languages, Erasmus+, Brilliant publications, Mary Glasgow, Linguascope, Hue, and OUP.

Like last year, it was a great opportunity to meet old friends, discuss language teaching, drink coffee and see short presentations from PGCE students, some NQTs and some other, more experienced languages teachers.

The first presentation was from Fiona Joyce.
Fiona shared her experiences of  2 recent job interviews, the second of which, and the one she really wanted, was a success. Fiona showed us some of the resources she used including a Quiz Quiz Trade activity and she also used what she called "hot chili" questions. The more difficult these questions are the hotter the chilli icon was on the white board.

The second presentation came from Claire Humphrey. Claire showed us how she has used Minecraft-style activities as a way to improve the reading and writing skills of her students. She used colouring grids and mini whiteboards as a way to get the students to write longer sentences in the target language.

Next came Diana Keszler.Diana showed us a number of amazing resources she uses with her groups.
Among these were her kitten picture starter activities where students have to say a sentence in the target language about one of the pictures on the screen. She also showed us "secret spy"; a card for students to fill in about the progress of one of their classmates, code cracking activities, talking pegs, extension cards, and her own version of tarsia puzzles* which "are easier to cut up".

(*Clare Seccombe's guide to Tarsia in MFL is here.)

Martin Heeley gave the next presentation where he demonstrated match up cards. These are cards with a question and the answer to a different question on. One student reads the question on their card and the person with the answer shouts it out and then reads their question, and so on. I like this a lot.

Next Annabel Forster showed us how to fake realia. She showed us how to fake emails and texts. This is easier to do if you have a German/French speaking friend who is willing to send you pretend texts in the target language. This reminded me of the Fakebook, SMS Generator and Twister from classtools.net.

Will Bowden then told us about his experiences of teaching students, who don't know how to tell the time, how to tell the time. He devised some numeracy activities to help the students overcome this, including using a pizza graphic to explain quarter past and quarter to. Will also told us about his "ipad v dictionary" competitions he has with his pupils looking up new vocabulary.

Next, primary specialist, Vikki Bruff, showed us how her pupils formed "human sentences". They have hi-viz vests and are given laminated words to attach to them, they them stand in a line to form a sentence in the target language.

Vanessa Burns then showed us some of the ways she gives feedback to her students. She quoted Dylan Wiliam "feedback versus feed forward" and shared her codes she uses to save a lot of time. Vanessa also told us about how her students feedback in a different colour and also how they peer assess.

Terri Dunne was next. She showed us how she gives recorded, spoken feedback to her students. Terri explained that it's quicker to record and send feedback to students than to write it and also her students like to guess where she was when she recorded it by the sounds in the background.

Following on from this, Joe Dale, demonstrated the Opinion Podcasts app which can be useful for setting speaking tasks for students which can then be saved, converted to mp3 using RP7 and stored in a shared cloud for assessing and feedback.

Alex Bellars shared an activity he had learned the previous weekend at #edcamp15, a photo scavenger hunt. I love this idea of students searching for clues in the target language.

The penultimate presentation of the morning session was from Samantha Paulin. She showed us how she uses crib sheets with phrases target language phrases to get the students to speak. She does this as a competition so each time a student uses one of the phrases they achieve points. My students have something similar pasted into their books but I've never made it a competitive thing. Perhaps I should.

The final presentation of the morning session was my 5 minutes on Time Management. It seemed to go down quite well. I've blogged about it here.

After lunch we had the first of 2 keynotes. This was from Steven Fawkes from ALL.
He talked to us about joining ALL and about the different types of CPD it offers.
Steven shared 2 websites with us: firstly, https://allconnectblog.wordpress.com/ which contains links on grammar and translation for teachers of KS2 and KS3 and secondly this site, http://all-literature.wikidot.com/ which contains information and texts to help teach literature.
For the final part of his speech, Steven presented some hilarious mis-translations into English from some old exam papers.

The next part of the afternoon was sessions from Erasmus+ and Vocab Express, two of the day's sponsors.

Then there were 3 sessions presented by Joe Dale, Alex Bellars and me.
Joe demonstrated how to use Book Creator App, Alex gave a presentation about Classdojo, and I did an updated,  much shorter and less creme-eggier version of my #ililc5 session, Teaching my dog to whistle.

The day finished with a presentation form the highly entertaining Chris Henley from Art of Brilliance.
He shared some hilarious anecdotes with us and pretty much convinced us all we were brilliant.

Oh, and I won a mug in the raffle.