30000 visits.

On Saturday morning this blog received its 30000th visitor. I don't know who it was but I'm very grateful.

When I started this blog in March 2009 I had no idea that anyone would want to read anything that I had to say and I'm still not convinced that they do.

My original idea was to review online resources which I had tried with my classes. Then my posts became more reflective and people started to take interest in my ideas.

The most popular post I have written is "Effective Feedback for Students" which still gets 20 or so hits each week (and is my personal favourite) but I get a lot of visitors who end up here after googling the word "coffee", too.

Anyway, whoever you are and however you got here, I just wanted to say, "Thank you."

Mitt Romney - la verité!

I've just read this article on the BBC news website. It concerns American Republican Presidential Frontrunner, Mitt Romney and the fact that one of his opponents, Newt Gingrich, has criticised him for SPEAKING FRENCH.

So what did he say that was so offensive to the ears of his fellow republicans?

Did he call for independence for Quebec?

No.

Did he say that France should no longer be a part of the Eurozone Bailout?

No.

Did he suggest that French colonialism in Africa was a good thing?

No.

He said, and I'm quoting here, "Je m'appelle Mitt."

What kind of people would see it as a disadvantage that the Head of State of the most powerful country in the world might be able to speak a foreign language?

Here is the video:

The subjunctivator.

**** This has now been replaced by the SUBJUNCTIVISOR ****

Happy New Year!

I thought I'd start 2012 by sharing a great online tool which my 6th formers have used.

It's called the Subjunctivator. It comes from www.about.com's French guide, Laura K Lawless.

The Subjunctivator consists of a drop down box with a long list of phrases in French, you select a phrase by clicking on it and wait. A new window opens with the correct answer (either subjunctive or indicative) and at least one sample sentence using the phrase in French.

For 6th form lessons it's ideal for revision and independent learning, as a starter or just to look up phrases which they aren't too sure about.

The end of another busy year.

It's the end of another busy year and I'd like to thank you all for visiting my blog.

Have a great time over the festive season and I hope you all have a happy

and successful 2012.

Picture courtesy of http://www.free-animations.co.uk

Another random name selector.

I have come across quite a few random name selecting tools now. This is one I discovered a few months ago and was reminded of it via twitter last week.

This one comes from primaryschoolict.com. It works very much like the classtools fruit machine. It has a different layout, a bright yelllow background, it allows you to paste class lists into it but one of its best features is also its worst feature.

This version reads the students' names as they are picked. It is so cool. I used this only once in class and it unfortunately mispronounced the students names. It's fine if you have students called Tom, Anne or Billy but it struggles with any exotic sounding names. This could be a big problem in some of my classes. My year 12 would think it hilarious but I can see that some of my year 8 students would not like it at all.

The main advantage of this name/question picker is that you can embed it into a blog or website.

I've had to resize it to fit here, but you can get the general idea. I've included the names of the current Oldham Athletic squad to show you how its "voice" has some very interesting pronunciation.

Random.org

Whilst randomly looking for random things to add to my "All things Random" collection I came across www.random.org.

It is a website dedicated to generating true (as opposed to pseudo) random numbers. The service is provided by Trinity College, Dublin and is the brain child of Dr Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics.

The site offers a range of free and paid services which allow the user to play games, shuffle playing cards, roll up to 16 dice, generate strings, pick random dates, and even pick lottery numbers.

One of my favourite things is the random number generator, which can be downloaded from the site, customised and tested here:

You enter a minimum number and a maximum number and click Generate. It's great for picking random students and it's a nice change from lolly sticks.

Using mobile phones responsibly and safely in schools.

Recently, I came across this article. It was produced in Austria by handywissen.at where almost everyone owns a mobile phone. I was going to post a link and then found that it had been uploaded to slideshare.

Using the mobile_phone_in_school

View more documents from Pedro De

It makes very interesting reading and has been written specifically for teachers giving advice and tips on how to deal with mobile devices in schools. It contains exercises which encourage students to learn how to use their mobile phones in a safe and responsible way.

It is definitely worth reading.