Blockages

Recently, at my school, there was an incident of cyber-bullying. As far as I'm aware it happened out of school hours and involved 2 young ladies, one sending unpleasant messages to the other.

However, it turns out that some students have been allowed to use Facebook and other social networking sites in school by some staff.

Because of this the people at the top have decided that all students will have no access to the internet for the foreseeable future. All sites, including the school's own website are blocked.

This means that my yr 7 students can't use wordle to create wordclouds to help them learn and revise the vocabulary for describing people.

My yr8 students can't use xtranormal to create movies based on some conversations they have been devising.

My yr9 students had to use Word to redraft their descriptions of their home-town rather than goanimate or toondoo.

Year 11 couldn't download the xtranormals they made to help learn their presentations or use Ashcombe School, MFLSunderland, wordreference or my own wiki to help with their revision and my yr13 class can't use google to look for information to help with their choice of cultural topics for the A2 French exam.

But there is some good news. The two girls are friends again.

CSI: The Experience Web Adventure

As one of 15,000 daily readers of Richard Byrne's Free Technology For Teachers blog, I often find out about some excellent applications. Not all of Richard's recommendations are relevant to Modern Languages but every couple of days there is something there which catches my eye.

One such eye-catching application was the CSI: The Experience Web Adventures game from Rice University's forensics department which is really interesting and which I recommended to a colleague who teaches science.

It's an online forensic science game designed for children which gives an insight into how an investigator would process a crime scene. There are 3 levels from beginner to expert.

Anybody can play the game online as a guest but you would need to register with the site if you want to be able to save your progress in the game.

On closer inspection I found that it can also be played in German and in Spanish.

If you are planning a cross-curricular science-MFL project, this could be ideal for improving students' motivation. If not, it may be worth showing it to your students as a bit of extra-curricular languages fun.

The light at the end of the tunnel...

In four weeks I shall be leaving my current teaching post to start another in a much larger school. I'll be sad to leave after 11 years but I am really looking forward to a challenge of a very different type in my new school.

My colleagues think that I should be winding down and having an easy time, but unfortunately I still have a mountain of work to do. The most pressing task of all is speaking exams.

Usually, I would wait until May before conducting GCSE speaking exams but this year will have to do them before the end of March.

Due to the organisation of school events this term I have only one more lesson with my GCSE students before the exam and have spent the last few lessons desperately trying to prepare them so that they can get the best possible results.

Since the beginning of term I have been tearing my hair out in desperation at my students' lack of motivation and effort and at the very laid back and often arrogant attitude they have to homework and revision.

That is until yesterday. Yesterday reality kicked in. Yesterday they started to work.

They wanted to answer questions. They started to ask questions. "Would it be better to say this?" "Can I say this in French?" "Is this wrong because..."

It was unbelievable. I felt my efforts were being rewarded at last.

Finally, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel....

...and I don't think it's a train.

Wordle #savewordle

Wordle is one of my favourite web 2.0 resources.

Wordle is one of my students' favourite resources.

They love it. It helps them learn, it motivates, and it lets them be creative. From the least able beginners in languages to the experts in my 6th form class, all of them have used it with a degree of success.

You can find some of their work on this blog and if you were to visit my classroom you would see one wall dedicated to students' Wordles comprising vocab lists, notes for presentations, grammar points, irregular verbs...I could go on all day.

And it is free to use.

And it isn't just my students who love it. It is students from all over the world in all subjects.

If you google "wordle" you'll find hundreds of thousands of pages singing the praises of the application, its uses in education, and its creator Jonathan Feinberg.

So imagine my sadness when I checked my tweets this morning to find that the site is no longer live and that when I went to check, I found this message left by Jonathan Feinberg:

wordle.net is Down Until Further Notice

I am seeking pro bono legal advice, to evaluate
a trademark claim against my use of the word "Wordle" for this
web site. If you're an intellectual property lawyer, with expertise
in trademark law, and you wish to offer professional
advice on this matter, please contact me.

So if you know such a lawyer, or are one yourself, please get in touch with Mr Feinberg at your earliest convenience.

Oh, and one final thought, if the educators on twitter spent as much time trying to help Mr Feinberg as they did trying to find another, similar (but obviously not quite as good) tool they can use for free with their students, the problem would be solved in no time at all.

I really hope that it is.

Options Evening - or - What's your subject worth?

This Wednesday is Options Evening.

Options Evening is the time of year when non-compulsory subjects in school compete with each other to try to get the Year 9 (14 year old) students (and their parents) to choose to study their subject for the next two years. This also has massive implications on departmental budgets and, quite possibly, staffing levels.

Over the last few years attracting students has become harder for the Languages Department due to the way options groups are set up and the increasing popularity of non-exam subjects which, it is claimed, are "worth" 2 or even 4 GCSEs.

So, what is a qualification in a modern foreign language worth?

Well, imagine you are a 14 year old boy.....(Horrible, isn't it?)

You can choose to study French, for which you will have to learn vocabulary and grammar, do homework regularly, revise and then sit exams and at the end of the course, if you have worked hard over 2 years, you will get a good GCSE grade.

Or...

You can choose to study a subject for which you must produce a portfolio of work and at the end of the course you get the equivalent of 4 GCSEs. If you haven't achieved the required grade you can go away do it again and keep resubmitting until you achieve your target.

Which would you choose? (If you say "French" you are not 14, you are lying, or you are French.)

When will schools and parents realise that it isn't the number of qualifications but the quality of education the students receive which matters?

SMS in the MFL classroom (or MfL in MFL)

I have written 2 posts recently about using mobile telephones in the classroom. One on this blog and one for José Picardo's box of tricks site.

In the boxoftricks post I outlined my plans for using mobiles in different ways this term.

This week I finally took the plunge and planned an activity to which my Year 11 students (16years old) could text their answers.

The lesson I chose to do this was also observed by the LA MFL inspector. So, no pressure there, then.

I planned a range of activities which the students could complete using their mobile phones.

Firstly, they wrote and practised dialogues in French, which they then filmed (although the more self-conscious students used their voice recorders instead. The cowards!)

Secondly, they sent their work to my laptop by bluetooth which we played back in order to do some peer assessment.

Thirdly, I created an exercise using SMSpoll.net to which the students sent their answers via SMS. When I was setting up the exercise I chose the option allowing students only one vote per telephone. Their answers then appeared in a graph on my interactive whiteboard.

You can see the results here:

Was it successful? I hear you cry.

Well, yes, of course it was. In some ways. (The correct answer was 1783, chosen by only 20% of the students. They were so keen to send off their texts, they didn't read the questions properly!)

The inspector was impressed by my use of technology: "Mobiles for Learning" he called it. Perhaps that is what MFL really stands for?

The students loved it and asked if they could do it every lesson.

I like smspoll it's good, but not perfect.

Obviously, the brains behind smspoll didn't intend for it to be an MFL classroom application but with a few tweaks it could be.

Firstly, you can only offer multiple choice questions.

Secondly, as far as I can make out, it will not allow you to use foreign language accents and characters. It was quite difficult for me to find answers for the task which didn't have "é" in them. It does let you enter them, but they appear as a blank space in the results.

Thirdly, the students are charged each time they send a text, unless (like all students in this particular class!) they have a contract which gives them unlimited texts.

Having said that, I shall definitely use it again.

And while I'm in a technological mood, I think I'll take a look at polleverywhere, too.

Watch this space.

Using technology in the MFL classroom

Recently, José Picardo invited some MFL teachers to write guest posts for his box of trickswebsite. The idea behind this was to focus on practice, promoting and encouraging the use of ICT in practical ways. Some amazing practitioners have already had their work published over the last couple of weeks and I was both surprised and flattered when I was asked to contribute.

So far José has published posts by:

Amanda Salt. Her post Looking back and moving forward is about the success of her PLN and how she has enhanced her teaching by using web applications.

Isabelle Jones. Her post was supporting assessment for learning. In it, Isabelle reviews some commercially available applications and assesses how they may be used to support AfL.

Simon Howells offering was using Google maps in the mfl classroom. I recently started to follow Simon on twitter and I have been impressed by his enthusiasm, his blog and his storybirds.

Helena Butterfield's post was based on the presentation she gave at TMNE09-2 and entitledtools to get pupils talking. In her post, Helena recommends some equipment and web applications which she has used with her students and which have improved their speaking skills.

My post was about using mobile phones in the classroom. I wrote about activities I have done with my students in which they used their mobile telephones and about my plans for the future of mobiles in my classroom.

Marie-France Perkin's post was fantastic. She wrote about her journey into the www and how technology has changed so much since she started her teaching career and helped her and her students to achieve much more.

In her post, using technology to enhance learning, self-confessed (or is that self-diagnosed?) "technochick" Lisa Stevens wrote about why she incorporates technology into her learning and how technology has enhanced learning in her classroom.

In Saira Ghani's post a word or two about wordle, she reflects on how her PLN has had a positive effect on her teaching and how it has inspired her to incorporate some of the tools she has discovered, focussing mainly on wordle, into her teaching repertoire.

Next comes Mary Cooch and her post German: OFF the curriculum but ON the VLE tells how by means of her school's VLE (which I believe she created) she managed to teach German GCSE successfully even though the school has taken that language off the curriculum. Fascinating and inspiring.

Finally, the most recent of the guest posts comes from Samantha Lunn. Her post simple but effective is a wonderful explanation of how she uses available technology simply and effectively in her daily teaching and in her preparation. Excellent advice for everyone.

So far, that is it. Each of the posts is interesting, educative and could be tried by almost anyone who is willing to put in the effort and step out of their comfort zone.

I'm sure that José will add more posts as he receives them and even without guest posts, his own work is worth reading on a regular basis, anyway. It is one of the best blogs you could possibly read.