Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom:

Au revoir Jean-François!

Today Nodehill said "Au revoir" to Jean-François Rolland, our French assistant for the academic year 2007-08. Before leaving "Jeff" shared some of his thoughts about living and working on the Isle of Wight since October, comparing his experience with life back in Brittany and his own education.

His comments about pupils' attitudes to language learning in England and France are particularly interesting and give a personal insight on the differences of our two educational systems.

Thanks Jean-François for agreeing to the interview and for all your help in improving Nodehill pupils' comprehension and pronunciation of French this year. We wish you all the best in the future and in particular about your plans to become a language teacher yourself. Stay in touch.

Download Interview_with_Jean_Francois.mp3

7JD Induction Podcast

Today was Induction Day at Nodehill where pupils met their new form teachers and got a taster of what life will be like in their new year group come September. To help my pupils gel and get to know each other better, we made a podcast about their thoughts and feelings of going into Year 7.

To do this, pupils first wrote their scripts in small groups and peer assessed them. I then gave them plenty of opportunity to rehearse before recording each group with my iRiver as one continuous mp3 file which I edited in Audacity. That done, Chloe added a voiceover to tie everything together and I exported the finished file as a wav which I could then drop on to The Levelator to balance the audio levels of the different speakers. Next, I imported a Flashkit loop for the final mix and here it is:

Download 7JD_Induction_2008.mp3

I was delighted with the outcome as were the pupils. See their comments below:

• I think that the podcast is a good idea and it sounds good because it takes our own opinions.
• I think the podcast is a good piece of technology because it records our voices and own opinions. You can also add music and erase bits.
• I liked making the podcast because it was really fun to make and it takes our own opinion about it all
• I think the podcast was fun because I liked making our script and you can also add music
• I enjoyed recording it. It was fun. It also came out very well. It is very funky.
• I really enjoyed making the podcast because when it was finished it sounded really, really, really good.
• I think that Induction Day is a great way to get used to your teacher and everything isn't so daunting!
• I think that Induction Day is a fun way to get to know your new class. I like the podcast because we can show what we thought.
• I thought that it was fun to do the podcast as it was something different to do.
• I think it went well and was really fun doing it
• I think the podcast went really well and I like the funky music.
• The podcast is brilliant and very creative. I can't wait to download it.
• I think it is really good. It was really fun to record ourselves and it came out really good in the end.
• I think the podcast is brilliant. It took a long time, but it was worth it.
• I really like the podcast, especially as I really like technology also. It is a great way of expressing feelings.
• I like the podcast and it's a clever way you can make the volume the same.
• I enjoyed doing the podcast, but not just for our benefit. Other children at other schools or in years to come can look at our podcast and find it is normal to be scared on the first day.
• I really enjoyed doing the podcast because we could say our opinions and listen to others. also we learnt more technology! Thanks.
• I thought that the podcast was a good idea.
• I thought it was quite cool being able to do it and put it on the internet.
• I thought it was a really fun way of telling people how you feel.
• I thought the music was funky.
• I thought the podcast was good because it was really fun to do.
• I thought it was really good and I like the music.
• I thought that it was really good. Some bits were funny and I liked the music.
• I thought the podcast was an excellent idea and it was really good.
• I thought the podcast was brilliant because it expressed our thoughts on Induction Day well.

Well done new 7JD and here is one of those scripts ...

Embracing technology at Nodehill

In May, David Morris, our headteacher talked to Ventnor Blog about how technology is being embedded across the curriculum and will be in the future before the school eventually closes under the island's plans for reorganisation. The interview gives a good insight on the strategic use of ICT at Nodehill and how careful planning and vision has allowed this to happen.

You can listen to the interview here.

Pushing the 'Pull Media Environment'

Before setting off for a week in Brittany, I attended the Lead Practitioner Induction Day at the Emirates Stadium and met up with the languages team for 2008/09 including new LP Chris Fuller. The atmosphere was very positive and colleagues enthusiastically shared ideas about their forthcoming seminars.

During one of the breakout sessions, I had the pleasure of listening to Alex Savage, LP coordinator for ICT talking about effective ways of using technology to build a learning network and maximise a training event.

Download Effective_uses_of_ICT_to_enhance_LP_Work.mp3

In just under fifteen minutes, Alex gave us his top tips for enhancing an LP seminar using ICT and ideas on how teachers can best network in the 21st century. First he talked of a three step process of organising a successful event e.g.

• Find or create a network
• Make your event as enticing as possible
• Give delegates the opportunity for feedback to inform you for future events

He then went on to suggest that to meet their training needs, teachers need to adopt the Pull Media approach favoured by many of today's young people where they select content they want to access when and where they want rather than Push Media which is delivered at a given time in a given place.

Alex referred to Alec Couros' diagrams for The Typical Teacher Network v The Networked Teacher to exemplify the Push/Pull Models.

The tools which Alex highlighted as facilitating this process are:

• iGoogle - Google Bookmarks, Gmail, Sticky Notes (personalise your desktop and keep in touch with your network using keywords instead of group email)
• Edublogs - CommunICTy blog (post articles of interest for your target audience, let people leave comments, create a newsletter on a blog)
• Wikispaces - CommunICTy wiki (a place to share and develop ideas collaboratively prior or after the event)
• Ning - ICTnet Ning (open or closed social networking site for you to upload resources and create fora for delegates to access after the event and extend discussions)

For more information, visit CommunICTy.org or contact Alex here.

Brittany 2008

Having slept for most of Friday, edited audio on Saturday and caught up with my emails and RSS feeds today, I'm now ready to blog about last week's educational visit to Brittany which by all accounts was a great success.

For those of you who follow my TwitterStream, you'll know what we got up to already. For those that don't, you can watch this slideshow or find out from the pupils themselves by listening to the recordings we made on the coach every morning reflecting on the previous day's adventures.

Download Day1.mp3

Download Day2.mp3

Download Day3.mp3

Download Day4.mp3

Download Day5.mp3

Unfortunately, my Gabcast experiment didn't work as all the numbers I tried when in France, wouldn't let me connect despite helpful texts from Chris Fuller back in England. I do know it is possible though as Gail Haythorne has proven with her pupils in Montpellier last week.

Next year, I may try Twitterfone as an alternative, if I can't work out what the problem is or bring along a mini notebook instead of relying on my mobile phone.

As for costs, the 30 odd tweets plus a five minute call to my head every evening came to about £30 in total although if I had been able to Gabcast successfully this probably would have been significantly more.

On the way to The American Cemetery, my colleague Richard Peace gave a moving talk to pupils about the Normandy Landings and the personal experiences of his grandfather who fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War which you can listen to here.

Download War_and_Peace.mp3

Hope you enjoy finding out more about our trip and thanks to those of you who tweeted while we were away. It's much appreciated.

Moblogging in Brittany

At 6.00 a.m. tomorrow morning, our Year 8 educational visit to Brittany officially starts. I'll be Gabcasting and twittering throughout the trip, so all of you can have regular updates of how we are getting on.

I will be interested to see how much my mobile phone bill will be, hopefully not too much and I will not be taking my laptop. So fingers crossed the technology works and everything goes to plan.

Adventures in Podcasting

While surfing the net yesterday, I discovered my post Adding a Podcast Pickle player to your blog was mentioned by Shawn Wheeler in his Adventures in Podcasting podcast in the RSS & Podcasting Tools section of Episode 108. In the podcast, Shawn describes some of the main features of the player which allows you to play a podcast straight from your blog. Nifty.

A seasoned podcaster, Shawn has published many useful resources to help potential podcasters get started. These include What is RSS? and Let's Build a Podcast where Shawn walks us through the step by step process of recording audio with free sound-editing software Audacity and uploading it to Podomatic.

Thanks for the shout out Shawn!

Download Adventures_in_Podcasting.mp3 

BBC Have your say

On the weekend of The Isle of Wight Festival it was nice to receive a message from Twitter saying that my tweets are now being followed by the BBC.

It doesn't get any bigger than this, does it? Rock and Roll!

Becoming 'New and Notable' in iTunes

Thanks to a kind tweet from David Noble, I discovered on Friday, that my newly formed podcast has appeared in the Educational Technology section of the iTunes chart at number 35! An impressive 13 subscribers have already signed up (according to Feedburner) and the podcast has been classified in the 'New and Notable section'. Whoo Hoo!

Sinclair MacKenzie from Sunday's EdTechRoundup Flashmeeting (one of the thirteen presumably) has even admitted to 'overdosing' for hours on episodes of my podcast on the way to a conference last week, glued to his car stereo, no doubt.

Seriously though, it's lovely to receive this sort of feedback as it reinforces the sense of audience (a key to one of the wow factors of podcasting) and it justifies the time it takes to produce broadcastable content.

So thank you to everyone who has listened in so far and particularly to the thirteen of you who have subscribed. A new episode will be along soon, I promise.

;)

Feedback from Language World 2008

This weekend, I received some lovely feedback from The Association for Language Learning about my session on podcasting at this year's Language World.

I'm delighted I was able to demystify the process of podcasting for delegates, allay fears over the difficulty of creating and publishing audio on the net and give everyone suitable support to help get them started.

Let's hope this positive response encourages more colleagues to come on board too.