Internet - AS French links

After the positive feedback from my Binge Drinking links, I've decided to do the next one.

So here are some authentic links to do with the internet:

This first one is amazing. It's from jeunesse77.fr and is called Touche pas à mon poste ! It is a 24 page pdf document containing lots of information and statistics (remember exam boards love statistics!) and is primarily aimed at young people.

From marocagreg.com - a summary of advantages and disadvantages of the internet

From Académie Toulouse - Quelques dangers d'Internet

An article from Le Monde from 2011 about the dangers of the internet, including a comparison between usage in France and other countries.

From internetsociety.org les enfants et l'internet.

sudmédia.free.fr has a page about the dangers of the internet for children including links to posters and a video clip. The posters could be used for speaking stimuli for the speaking exam.

Action Innocence is a site full of child protection  information. The page Préserver la dignité et l'intégrité des enfants sur internet is full of great material and also has some Supports pédagogiques.
An image search for Action Innocence gave me a huge quantity of material for speaking practice.

From lepetitjjournal.com an article about Le cyber bullying 

From Le Figaro, an article with lots of statistics about le cybercrime in France.

This page from Gendarmerie Nationale contains information on how they are tackling cyber-crime.

Here is a link to the TES resources for l'internet.

Steve Smith's frenchteacher.net site also has some fantastic resources in the free samples section but I'd recommend that all teachers of French subscribe to access all of his excellent resources for the price of a text book.

Obviously, I won't use all of these resources with my students inn class but I shall give them a list of the sites for their own independent reading.

Over the years I've found that the students who achieve best are the ones who read independently and there's nothing wrong with pointing them in the right direction.

Beuverie Express - AS French links and resources

Hi. I hope you're enjoying your summer.

In September I will be teaching AS level French again and I'm really looking forward to it.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post with lots of links to all of the topics.

Sadly, some of these links no longer work or are out of date.

So I decided to update each of the topics with a list of resources and articles.

I'm a great believer in sharing ideas and resources so if you use any of these resources, or find better ones, please let me know how successful they were.

More importantly, if you use them share them with your colleagues.

Today's list, then, is everything good I've found about Binge Drinking or, if you're a member of the Académie Française, la beuverie express.

• From Nice-Matin 

• From pourquoidocteur.fr an article about energy drinks and binge drinking

• An article from Actu Santé which links binge drinking to agression, anxiety and depression.

• This is a good article from Terrafemina which claims that people who drink a lot are more popular.

• A "news story" about american reality TV "star", Scott Disick, who apparently "boit comme un trou".

• An article from digischool.fr about young people and alcohol. This page has some links to similar articles, too.

• Article "Sexe, drogue et alcool" from lematinal.com 

• From Vin et Société, some statistics about young people and alcohol 

• From docteurclic: Alcoolisme chez les jeunes. This has statistics, information and video clips.

• From crioc.be, a 43 page pdf document "jeunes et alcool" with lots of statistics. Exam boards like statistics!

• A page from the Canadian Health Ministry about alcohol abuse and young people

A French documentary about binge drinking.

Anti drinking campaign video


A list of more videos can be found here.

There are free resources on the TES website here and here. There are lots of KS4 alcool resources on TES which you could use to start the topic.

Sutton Academy's Fun with Languages site has some games and activities related to the topic here.

So there you go. Hopefully you'll find at least one useful thing among these links.

Enjoy the rest of the summer break.

ipad training with Joe Dale

This week my department was lucky enough to get some ipad training. 

I know. I said "lucky" and "ipad" in the same sentence.

Those of you who regularly read this blog will remember that I am not always that kind to the ipad. A few of my blog posts are testament to that. 

However, I have always stated that rather than give tech to teachers and say "get on with it", schools should be providing staff with training to use it properly.

My wonderful department employed the services of ipad, MFL and all earth-based technology expert Joe Dale this week.

So what did we learn? 

Well, obviously the best thing would be for you to contact Joe and get some training first hand.

I'll go through some of the apps ( I still hate this word!!!) we used and provide some links:

Tap roulette

This is a simple app to decide which person in a group gets to go first.

Easy to use and free. 

Decide Now

This is a paid app (£0.69) but very useful. It can be used as a random name selector a random question selector or a random topic selector. Easy to set up and use but wheels can't be shared.

30 Hands

This free app allows the user to create a narrated story or presentation by adding a commentary to photos or pictures. This is an ideal way to get students talking about lots of different topics and can be edited so that only the "perfect" version is saved.

Tellagami

I've used this for a while and I and my students love it. I 've been using this for quite a while and it featured in my workshop at #ililc4 in February.

This app allows student to create a talking avatar and customise its expression, clothing, features and choose or upload a background. The user can upload 30 seconds of dialogue or use the text to speech facility. This application is free but, after its most recent update, some of the features are now "in app purchases" (I hate that phrase!!).

Yakit Kids 

Yakit kids is free and jolly good fun. Again, I discovered this at my #ililc4 workshop.

It allows the user to upload a photo and add eyes, noses and mouths to puppetise inanimate objects and make them talk. Great for getting students to speak in the target language and they can have fun changing the pitch of the voices, too.

We also learned about Cloudart, Tag Cloud, QRReader, QRafter, and were shown classtools.net's QR code Treasure Hunt Generator.

Joe also demonstrated Voicerecord Pro and Visioprompt which could help GCSE students with their controlled assessments.

The session ended with Joe showing us Book Creator, an app which we can use to create a virtual record of everything we did during the afternoon, photos, presentations, videos, etc.  

The afternoon was a huge success. 

My colleagues were really impressed and have spent the last few days practising with their new knowledge and planning some fantastic activities for the students.

Needless to say, I would recommend hiring Joe for a session at your school.

Subjunctivisor

A couple of years ago I blogged about a fantastic tool called the subjunctivator.

This week I was contacted by its creator Laura K Lawless who informed me that it no longer exists.

Laura's work has now moved from about.com to lawlessfrench.com.

This is where you can find her new, improved Subjunctivisor.

It works in exactly the same way. 

It's great.

What more can I say?

pokankuni

pokankuni is a Tulu word.

I found it in one of my  favourite books: The meaning of Tingo which is a collection of strange words from other languages which have no equivalent in English.

Tulu is a language spoken in India by around 2 million people.

pokankuni means learning from others by just watching them.

I like this idea.

I often learn how not to do something by watching others, but that's another story.

Today, I did a carousel of activities with my year 7 (beginners 12yrs old) class.

One of the activities was to create a tellagami in French using the future tense (Je vais + infinitive).

The instruction I gave them was: open the tellagami app and create an animation in French using today's key vocabulary. I didn't show them how to use it or even explain what it was.

None of them had ever used tellagami before and I was really impressed at how quickly they took to it. They were only allowed 10 minutes for each activity yet they still all managed to produce something.

The more confident ones took to it immediately and the others picked it up in a couple of minutes just by watching.

All students engaged, all learning and all I had to do was wander about and ask questions.

pokankuni in action.

Brilliant.

How to reanimate a corpse - #mflsaty2

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending the second MFL Show And Tell York at Harrogate Grammar School, or, as all the cool kids are calling it #mflsaty2.

The brain child of Suzi Bewell (aided and abetted by Will Strange) this was the second of its kind and even better than the first.

The event was sponsored by the Association for Language Learning and there were around 60 or so attendees (many of whom were newly qualified teachers) and a few corporate people with products to sell.

The amazing Jo Hardy has blogged in detail about the day on her blog here. Thanks, Jo.

I show and tell-ed 5 minutes of the old favourite how to make a powerpoint into an animation but I polished it up, or at least, rolled it in glitter for the day.

Where's Spot? or How to reanimate a corpse.

Where's spot? or How to reanimate a corpse. from Dominic McGladdery

I was also asked to run a 20 minute session in the afternoon.
These are referred to as "Genius bars".
I really don't like this title as it suggests that I'm some kind of expert.
I'm not.
I'm a regular classroom practitioner and sometimes not even a very good one.
It was a low tech affair on how to get students speaking without too much tech.
Again, this was a revised, rehashed and shorter version of "From squawk to talk" from #ililc3 and from ALL Newcastle's twilight session last week.

From squawk to talk #mflsaty2 version from Dominic McGladdery

Feedback was very good and I was surprised that people enjoyed it, but, hey, there's no accounting for taste.

Seriously though, it was a great day, extremely well organised and I picked up some great ideas from some excellent new teachers.

If the people I met on Saturday are a true reflection of the new generation of MFL teachers then we have nothing to be scared of.

Our kids will be in safe hands for the foreseeable future despite what Mr Gove throws at us.

Tour de France 2014 links

It seems that there is not just football related activities going on at the moment.

The 2014 Tour de France starts in Yorkshire (no, you're right Yorkshire isn't in France) on 5th of July.

Here is my list of links to various sites and resources I've found so you don't have to bother:

• The official site in French

• The official site in English

• Sustrans has produced a free pack for teachers in English to promote cycling

• The TES website has some resources here, here, and here.

• Lightbulblanguages has a KS2 podcast on the Tour de France.

• A tour de france 2014 page from Orange with articles and information.

• The BBC's Ma France site has a Tour de France card game and other resources.

• Lancsngfl has a tour de france hot potatoes gapfill exercise.

• Le Figaro has a nice 2014 route map and a history of the tour.

• France TV Sport has a page dedicated to all kinds of Tour information and a game here.

• Some coloriages

• legende-et-conte has a page on the Tour's history.

• Bradford City Council has produced some resources in English here

• Cycle Yorkshire has also produced a number of English resources

If you can find anymore or have made and published some, please let me know and I'll add them to the list.