Esther Mercier on her wonderful website À Tantôt, digital video and podcasting
For my second interview this week, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Canadian born, Esther Mercier, MFL teacher from Longridge High School in Lancashire whose free website À Tantôt ( 'See you soon' in Canadian French ) has been a revelation for language teachers and their pupils around the world. In addition to the demands of being a full-time teacher, Esther admits to spending between 25-30 hours a week creating resources for the site on top of her normal marking load.
The site which is now three years old contains resources for French, German and Spanish at KS2-KS4 designed for the interactive whiteboard and programmed in Flash. The traffic it receives is huge (about 30,000 hits a day on average) and its bandwidth is a whopping 50GB of bandwidth per month, all paid for by Esther. If this wasn't enough, Esther also explains her use of digital video, podcasting and her love of singing in the classroom.
In our conversation, Esther talks about:
- how she has always been interested in using technology in the classroom
- her New Opportunities Fund (NOF) training
- using Easiteach on her interactive whiteboard
- learning how to use Macromedia Studio and in particular Flash
- the benefits of digital video for motivating pupils
- Longridgvision and the X-Factor in French
- developing À Tantôt as a learning resource
- the community which has grown around the site
- joining a podcasting pilot group in Lancashire
- using an Olympus Digital Recorder and Switch - Sound File Conversion software
- going to the ALL London January event
- her future plans - introducing Italian on À Tantôt and more digital video projects
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Mrs Mercier is my German teacher and she is fantastic. Her website is such a help. Such a devoted teacher.
Posted by: Kimberley | 22/11/2007 at 19:22