The BETT 2007 MFL Saturday Special was everything I could have imagined and more. It was brilliant catching up with colleagues, discussing new ideas and having a giggle at the same time. The rigorous notes I made at Lesley's, Peter's and Chris' sessions will be appearing as blog posts or a blog post in the not so distant future. To start off with though I thought I'd publish the recording I made at my session ICT … so what? - Using technology to enhance learning outcomes across all four language skills to get the ball rolling.
This was not the first time I'd been at BETT. For the last two years I've talked about my Teacher's Pet toolkit for The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust on their stand. This time however, I was speaking on behalf of The Association for Language Learning having become a member of their Special Interest Group for ICT in 2004.
Helen Myers, ALL president elect and deputy headteacher at The Ashcombe School, in Dorking, Surrey introduced me with some very kind words and enthusiastic tones. She also took the opportunity to encourage those attending the session to sign up to ALL if they weren't already members and to attend the forthcoming ALL London January Event and Language World conference, sentiments which I certainly would share. With her new camera, Helen also took some photos of the day which can now be viewed in all their glory on the ALL London website here
The idea of my session was to show how ICT could be used to engage learners and help them to improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The show notes include all the links discussed as well as some video tutorials so you can practise at home. Have a listen and see what you think.
Download posting_to_a_Typepad_blog.wmv
Download stickmen_tutorial.wmv
Download How_to_make_a_writing_frame_with_a_dropdown_menu_in_Word.wmv
Download writing_frame_example.doc
Download examples_for_teachers_pet.doc
Download spellmaster_with__audio.zip
Download toolkit_for_teachers.zip
Show notes
TES ICT Blog post about Spellmaster
PowerPoint session at SSAT Annual Conference
http://del.icio.us/joedale/MFLblog
Posts on podcasting from categories list
Tutorials for Audacity from my Del.icio.us tag roll
Posts on mobile phones from categories list
Bernard Clark interview on using audio
Podsafe music links from my Del.icio.us tag roll
Example lesson for Teacher's Pet
Andrew Balaam interview on Languages Online
Computer tips mentioned in the session
1. To change the size of your text in Word, PowerPoint etc, hold down the Ctrl key and then next to the Enter key, hold down either the squiggly bracket on the right to make it bigger or on the left to make it smaller.
2. To make a webpage go full screen, press the F11 key in Internet Explorer and then right click the bar at the top and click Auto-Hide. Reverse these instructions to go back to previous state
3. To include a keypad to help your pupils add accents to a Hot Potatoes page, go to the Configuration file by clicking the icon which looks like a black box with red, blue and yellow dots on it and a luggage tag and then click the Other tab. Put a tick in the box next to Include a keypad to help the student type non-roman characters.
To finish, why not have a look at my Scrapblog of the day?
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