Last week, I was 'on tour' again, away from the day job and meeting a variety of MFL colleagues face to face on my travels. First up, was a Thursday visit to the new CILT headquarters conveniently positioned just one tube stop away from Waterloo at Lambeth North.
There I was taking part in preliminary discussions about some video case studies which Becta has commissioned CILT to produce on how ICT can be used to enhance 'hard to teach' topics at GCSE and KS3.
Five of us have been selected to take part in the project and have agreed to be filmed using a range of technology to enhance our language lessons. Guidance will come from Terry Cooper and Claire Dugard from CILT and Steven Fawkes from ALL. The four other teachers are:
- Gemma Fordyce (Woodlands School, Basildon, Essex)
- Joanne Brophy (St Julie's Catholic High School, Liverpool)
- Fiona Hilton (Richard Lander School, Truro, Cornwall)
- Barbara Hlavaty (Crofton School, Fareham Hampshire)
I've chosen 'er verbs' as my 'difficult to teach' topic and I plan to use software such as PowerPoint, Hot Potatoes, Teacher's Pet, and Audacity to engage the pupils and help them learn. Terry will be visiting me this Friday to plan out how to best capture these techniques on film. Looking forward to it.
After a quick pit stop at home, I was off again on Friday to Brookfield Community School for a podcasting workshop as part of an inset organised by Assistant Headteacher Roger Hutchin and the Fareham and Gosport Modern Languages Curriculum Development Group.
Over a hundred local language teachers attended the various workshops planned for the day and I had a great time showing thirty or so of them how to publish their audio files on the net so that their pupils could subscribe to them. The excitement was palpable! Listen to their feedback here:
Download Feedback_from_brookfield_course.mp3
Finally, for the last date of the tour, I returned to London to attend the ALL London January Event at The London School of Economics. It was great seeing so many familiar faces and catching up with people's news. Thanks to Sara Sullivan, Wendy Adeniji and Jen Sutton for letting me record their inspiring sessions and for Helen Myers for organising yet another successfull ALL-London event.
Winding down in a nearby pub afterwards was an extra treat and also gave me the opportunity to go through the step by step process of creating your own podcast with interested colleagues. See images from the ALL London site to see how we got on.
The last image in this post is a record of all my mobile tweets while I was away. As you can see it was quite a life-affirming experience.
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