CILT video case study project

A camera man and sound engineer came to Nodehill two weeks ago (7th March) to shoot our video case study for the CILT project on the effective use of ICT for hard to teach topics. Accompanied by project manager Terry Cooper, the team stayed all day and filmed the pupils using a variety of applications in the classroom and ICT suite.

For my hard to teach topic I chose to cover er verbs with my middle band Yr 7 form class as this is what we are learning at the moment and I felt it would lend itself well to showing how ICT can enhance traditional methodology and be used to present, practice and perform new language effectively.

As filming had to be done in one day, we needed to pretend that the classroom footage had been shot two weeks earlier and represented the prior learning to the lesson in the ICT suite. Like many teachers, I've always found video case studies of 'real' classroom practice as being somewhat artificial and unrealistic although I accept that in this type of project avoiding a certain sense of performance is perhaps impossible.

Nonetheless, I can confirm that each scene was shot in no more than two takes and this was simply to allow for different angles to be included and for close-ups of pupils' faces when they were speaking. It was great that over three quarters of my form were allowed to appear in the clip because we had permission from their parents to do so and that they felt honoured to be one of only five classes to be taking part in the project throughout the country.

For the classroom lesson I wanted to show a range of good examples for whole class teaching using free or readily available software such as PowerPoint, Audacity, Spellmaster and Hot Potatoes on the interactive whiteboard. These included:

• revising nine er verbs with PowerPoint using Animation Factory images and a variety of custom animations
• playing blockbusters with PowerPoint using triggers to allow blue or white tiles to appear independently
• using the drag and drop macro in PowerPoint to order the subject pronouns, stems and er verb endings correctly
• using cue cards made with the Teachers Pet macro Flashcard Maker so pupils could do the same activity in pairs 
• recording pupils singing the verb paradigm of jouer to the tune of Frère Jacques with Audacity
• looping the track while they match up the French forms with the English equivalent using Spellmaster's Jigword as a way of catering for different learning styles (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic)
• gapfilling with Hot Potatoes JCloze using XP's On-Screen Keyboard

In the ICT suite, pupils used TaskMagic, Spellmaster, Linguamate and Hot Potatoes to complete rigorous interactive exercises on conjugating er verbs while two of the class recorded a podcast of the script they had written themselves on the point of grammar using Audacity. Terry then asked them to explain how podcasting along with other forms of technology they had used had helped them to learn effectively. I was delighted to hear them answer all the questions sensibly and with aplomb.

In the afternoon, Terry interviewed me too and gave me the opportunity to describe in more detail some of my thoughts on how ICT can enhance language learning and in particular for 'hard to teach' topics such as er verbs. The idea of this was to tie all the footage together and to provide an appropriate narration to the different scenes.

The finished clip should be appearing on the Languages-ICT website next month and I for one can't wait!

Comments

[John]

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