Lynne Horn - Principal Teacher of the Language Faculty in Tobermory High School, Isle of Mull has kicked off the new academic year by asking her S5/6 (Yr11/12) vocational language students to blog about their experiences of learning Italian from scratch. To coordinate the individual blogs, Lynne has set up a mother blog, a term used by Barbara Ganley recently at the blog.ac.uk 2006 conference and described in Ewan McIntosh's post How to effect change in teaching and learning.
The language students Geri, Lauren and Kate are setting themselves individual weekly targets to help them achieve each phase of the course. To begin with these include:
- to say hello
- to say their name
- to say their age
- to ask how someone else is
By using technology, Lynne is enabling her students to study a language they find stimulating, yet may otherwise not have the opportunity to learn.
To celebrate the European Day of Languages on 26th September 2006, there are plans to interview a range of native speakers on how they learn languages, the results of which will be posted on the Tobermory High School website.
It will be interesting to track how the students get on over the next few weeks. I'm sure they'll be able to match the recent successes of the Italian World Cup team and achieve their desired outcomes. Keep checking the mother blog to find out how they are getting on.
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