Teach Meet Tees11

This week I attended the first Teachmeet Tees. It was organised by Steve Bunce and Simon Finch and the venue was the ARC in Stockton. It was reasonably well attended, but it wasn't the quantity of attendees but the quality which really impressed me.

I got to meet some old friends and some new ones but the most important thing was I actually learned new things.

I think teachmeets can be great for linguists as you get to see what teachers of other subjects are doing and I love the informal atmosphere. Very often you can find a use for an idea, a piece of software, or a website that is ideal for use in languages lessons that was not intended to be used in MFL lessons at all.

The presenters were:

Martin Waller who told us about his Growing Greener Together project. This is a whole school approach to creative learning through gardening, cooking, conservation, enterprise and using digital technology.

Pete Fox. Pete showed us some excellent resources for improving numeracy across the curriculum. One of which was tutpup which allow users to play lots of maths games but also compete with other children from across the world.

Alasdair Douglas told us about an amazing year 7 project at his school which was based on the Angry Birds games. The pupils designed, created and played their own versions of the game using skills they had learned in science, maths, geography, technology, etc. He tells it a lot better than I do, perhaps because he was one of the instigators and facilitators.

Mark Clarkson showed us his "image of the week" idea. This is where he uses photos to engage students in tutor time to get the to think and speak about the world around us. The pictures come from boston.com where there are galleries of news related photos from around the world.

Simon Finch showed us the history of his dealings with the apple corporation from buying his first mac to reviewing for mac user magazine in the early days and everything since and also showed us how to make mini books and gave us a few dozen reasons on how we could use them creatively in our classrooms. Simon also took dozens of photos of the event which can be found on his flickr page.

Lynda Dixon shared her love of writing implements in her "Stationery or stationary?" presentation which (as well as looking like a plug for all things Apple-y) also included a video of José Picardo's ideas on how people currently use technology in their everyday lives.

Helena Butterfield showed us all about e-twinning with schools around the world and the adventures of Michel, the teddy bear traveller, who has visited schools in many different countries as a result of a recent e-twinning project.

Fiona Joyce showed us the amazing world of Storybird an amazing site for collaborative storytelling. Fiona has even set up a storybird wiki for teachers of languages to share storybirds they have made. If you haven't seen her wiki yet, you should visit and be inspired.

Steve Bunce also presented in collaboration with Simon and urged us to look at his Kindles and play on his Xbox kinect.

Helen Daykin, representing sponsor I am learning, provided the most amazing cupcakes, too.

My presentation "10 ways to use mobile phones in your classroom" included a phone poll to gauge how great it would be for the attendees to use mobiles in their own classrooms. I made it with the free version of smspoll. it seemed to go down OK despite my terrible cold and sounding like the offspring of Mariella Frostrup and Joe Pasquale.

Here are the results of the online mobile phone poll:

Agreeing with Gove? Surely not?

For those who don't know, Michael Gove MP is the UK government's Secretary of State for Education.

He has more cunning plans than Baldrick and, usually, they are just as ridiculous, but today, I find myself agreeing with him.

It was this article in this morning's Guardian which made me stop and think.

My first thought was, "Who are you, and what have you done with Michael Gove?"

I continued reading.

This quote really floored me:

"Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English. It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning."

Teaching languages from the age of five?

In all primary schools?

Is it really going to happen?

I doubt it .

We'll just have to wait and see.

MFL Show and Tell Plus

Saturday 24th September was the 4th MFLSAT+, an informal modern languages unconference were anyone who wanted could stand at the front of the auditorium (or appear at the various Genius bars) at Cramlington Learning Village and share ideas, resources, enthusiasm and passion with linguists from all over the UK.

Thanks go to Chris Harte (and Fabienne) for organising the whole event, the sponsors (without whom..) and everyone from the experienced practitioners to the trainee teachers who came and spoke and, more importantly, listened.

As usual, I saw some old friends I've met before (including one very old friend, Lynn), some old friends I've ever met in person and met new ones, and was in awe of all the presenters.

I learned lots about new (to me) resources and stole some ideas which I have already started to put into practice.

But enough about me.

I wrote pages and pages of notes (some of which I can just about read!) but lots of people who were there have already blogged about MFLSAT Plus and there was even a flashmeet so you can watch it all, if you have a few hours to spare.

So rather than bore you with my own fuddled recollections (or steal their thunder) I shall just give you the links to Clare Seccombe's blog and Amanda Salt's blog, not because I'm lazy, but because they are amazing, have better memories and I couldn't have put it better if I'd tried.

I am really looking forward to the next one.

European day of languages 2011.

It's that time of the year again. Monday 26th September 2011 is European Day of Languages. Not a day to celebrate European languages, but a day in which ALL languages are celebrated.

To help you all celebrate here is a list of pages chock full of ideas:

This is the link to the wiki I created in 2009. Please join and add your ideas or just borrow the ideas already there.

Here is the CILT European Day of Languages page.

EDoL resources on TES website.

Some EDoL videos on youtube.

That should keep you busy.

Enjoy.

La Coupe du Monde de Rugby à XV

Here are some links to rugby world cup related sites, pages and authentic resources in French:

• The Official site - everything you could possibly need or want to know (also available in Spanish).
• Supporter les bleus! - iphone app - keep up to date with the French team.
• BBC Ma France rugby activities and links - has some really good rugby terminology games.
• Site of the French rugby federation - lots of match information.
• A scoopit page dedicated to the tournament curated by Guillaume Marin, a French ICT teacher and rugby fan. Follow him on twitter here.
• La tribu du XV a site by Société Générale - contains information and videos of the 15 children (parrains) they have chosen to help support the French team during the competition. SG has made tv commercials throughout the summer using the children to show their support for Les Bleus.
• A nice flipchart from promethean planet.
• A worksheet from TES Resources.
• Dedicated rugby pages from French newspaper Le Monde

Since writing this post I have discovered more links and resources:

• This link on TES is to a brilliant worksheet from Lauren Crawley
• The rest of the links come from linternaute.com a French online magazine.
• Le haka, un rituel à faire frémir les adversaires.
• Les règles du rugby.
• Les emblèmes des équipes de rugby.
• Pourquoi le ballon de rugby est-il ovale ?
• Les 12 stades de la Coupe du Monde de rugby en Nouvelle-Zélande.

Learning Mandarin is NOT the solution!

Recently published A level and GCSE results have shown that the number of students studying languages has fallen by a significant amount. The government, is trying to resolve the problem (it thinks) by introducing Ebacc, forcing reluctant students to study a language.

Relevance has always been an issue in the language learning debate and many students either don't see the relevance, don't want to put in the effort or simply prefer other subjects. Given the choice, many year 8 and 9 students I have encountered would drop languages in favour of more PE, ICT, Technology, Drama, etc. and I probably would have done, too.

This is not because they don't like languages, but because they would prefer to do something else. Analogy: I love drinking coffee but give me the choice between cup of coffee and a cold beer on a hot summer's day and the beer would win every time.

So, what is the solution?

Make language learning "fun"?

Make it more relevant?

Force students to study MFL?

I don't know.

But I do know that teaching Mandarin in our schools is definitely NOT the solution.

Subliminal language learning - The results of the experiment.

You may remember, although there is no reason why you should, this post from last year where I set out to prove that I could learn a language from scratch without doing any work at all.

The language in question was Icelandic. The way I was going to learn it was through a "subliminal CD" which cost me $3.99 including shipping and taxis (sic) and was "developed by Medical doctors and PhDs in psychology", but sadly not in icelandic.

The plan was to listen to the CD regularly in the car and on my mp3 player. I gave myself exactly one year to do it and I, and the occasional unwitting passenger, have been "subliminally learning Icelandic" religiously for exactly 12 months.

The idea behind this was that if I ever met an Icelander I would be able to converse with them fluently in their own language and they would be really surprised, but not as surprised as I would be.

You will both be pleased to know that the experiment has now come to an end.

Some people said it could not be done.

They were right.

It was a huge failure.

I can categorically testify that it is impossible to to learn a language subliminally or, as we say in Icelandic:

það er ekki komið í staðinn fyrir vinnu*.

*there's no substitute for hard work.