Creating a Learning Community

I feel very strongly that the aim of all educational organisations should be to model lifelong learning. This has the advantage of teaching students by example that learning is an enjoyable process that really is on-going. However, to create teaching and learning communities, proof must be made that the professional and personal development of each member of the group is taken very seriously indeed.

Nothing will happen if the only way of sharing is through monitoring. Sharing has to happen in all directions and this can be tricky as some of the group members’ skills will be more visible than others. Every contribution that has the potential to move Learning and Teaching forward by making us consider a different way to do things should be valued. This should be considered regardless of experience or status within the organisation.

Within our Faculty, I have considered different ways of “growing together as a learning community”:

· Providing opportunities to share ideas and resources through my bulletin and Faculty meetings -by asking for contributions and allocating meeting slots for sharing-“Bring and Brag”-example of a powerpoint by a colleague who wanted to reflect through educational reading on how students’ concentration and listening skills could be developed ;

· Identifying niches of expertise that have a potential for positive impact in the classroom: cross-curricular, extra-curricular, pastoral, ICT integration… ;

· Constantly evaluating our practice as a group and providing opportunities for self-assessment. The evaluation needs to be honest and respected by the other members of the group if it is shared. The discussions started by the self-audit will also help support the more formal development plans linked with performance management;

· Providing resources and opportunities to find out more about a particular area of interest through our Faculty bulletin and its links to My Languages and Diigo /Del.icio.us . This would equate to developing our students' independent learning skills-provide scaffolding and opportunities for extension work!

Locally, ideas can be cross-fertilised through subject meetings and StrategicLearning Networks consisting of a number of local schools with very different profile.

Nationally, lists like Linguanet and mfl resources are also invaluable to refresh and exchange ideas, but participation will often depend on ICT skills and access at home. The same goes with the international professional connections now possible through networking sites like Twitter or Diigo .

To some extent, a number of Wikis have also been set up with that aim and I hear that Second Life is likely to be the next developmental tool, with an International Language Conference being scheduled for 23rd/ 24th May 2008…

My Studiyo: First Attempt and More Ideas for Quizzes

After trying to design quizzes with Studiyo, I found out from a colleague today at our Faculty Bring and Brag that the Smartboard gallery of Notebook 10 includes very similar templates, without having to put up with the unreliability of a live download.

However, Studiyo would still be very good for home studies and class blogs-something to think about...

My Visite a Paris Quiz can be found on http://www.mystudiyo.com/act65160/mini/go/une_visite_a_paris

The IWB Challenge: Week 4

I can’t believe this is the end of my challenge and also my 100th post on this blog. In some way, this is only the beginning…

On Monday, I used some simple Notebook drag and drop exercises with my Year 5 to get them to practise talking about time in Spanish. I also learnt how to use shapes as text boxes, fill them, group and lock them –while allowing move. I feel there is quite a lot of potential with the colour fill and the shapes as a way to highlight grammatical patterns from an early stage.

I have also been experimenting with the blind. My topic was clothes, so I set up a “What is in my wardrobe” activity. Students had to guess the item slowly revealed and we also played an alternative game where I flashed the whole content of the wardrobe to the students and they had to list as many as they could remember-in Spanish of course!. To make sure a team won, I made sure I was really strict with pronunciation and it was great to hear members of the different teams correct each other in order to win the game.

On Tuesday, I continued to exchange ideas and tips with my colleagues and this lead to Notebook 10 being installed onto our school network server. After enquiring about Notebook 10 new features on my Twitter network, I was referred to the magic pen feature presented by Danny Nicholson on his whiteboard blog and the Smartboard lesson podcast by Ben Hazzard. Some other features highlighted by Danny were object animation, page themes, magic pen, tables (and the cell shade), page animation and the new fill effects. I am still working on some of those, but it was a great start.

On Thursday, I also went ahead with idea of using powerpoint to structure the whole of my lesson and import links to bring in more interactive Notebook activities. Unfortunately, I was not able to upload those documents here as Scribd and docstoc do not recognise the Smartboard Notebook format.

My real find has been various shortcuts to import various parts of a Powerpoint presentation to make it possible for it to be manipulated on the board by students. For instance, I copied and pasted in Notebook the text from a slide and dragged part of it out of the text box, which duplicated it. I also found out that all the different labels or parts of a phrase could be locked simultaneously by using the control key, which saved me considerable time.

I then used the original box with the complete sentence/ paragraph to put in order and hid it using the white marker with the idea that I could start reveal the sentence to be put back together-by erasing the white marker ink- if students were starting to get stuck at a particular point.

As my board decided to freeze at that point, I changed my activity to get students to link the different parts of the sentences using the board markers. I also got somebody to time the students to add a little competitive element as the timer I had imported from the gallery had also frozen on that occasion… At the end of the lesson, the board revived and I was able to do a similar activity directly on the board. The erase and revealed effect worked well but next time, I will put the answer to be revealed in a shape to avoid searching for it with the eraser!!!

After reading about Helena Butterfield’s amazing second week, I am determined to try out Studiyo and Animoto.

The challenge is definitely still on…

The IWB Challenge: Week 3

This has been a bit of a strange week, with our school feeling eerie and deserted due to the Teachers’ strike today. As a result, just like Jess McCulloch, I feel that I did not spend as much time trying things out with my Smartboard as much as I would have liked to.

On Monday, I used my Smartboard as usual with animated Powerpoint to present and reinforce new language. I played a new game with Y6, “Guess which item is going to go round and round”, which worked well and is a different take on “guess the next item to disappear”, with team competitions and extra points being given for correct guesses and pronunciation.

I also had a look at Ink Aware, the Smartboard Application recommended via Twitter by Lisa Thumann to amend my Powerpoints.

On Tuesday, I used this blog on the IWB to demonstrate “Word Magnets” at our Faculty meeting and introduced a colleague to the magic paper and the erase and reveal techniques so clearly demonstrated in the Rebbeca Duncan ‘s videos recommended by Jess last week

I got my Notebook training going, exchanging ideas and tips with my colleague. We looked at the Smartboard Gallery in order to select tools that could be useful to a language teacher. We selected the timer, interactive dice, the spinner, the scrolling banner and many more like the question and answer template.

I was also shown how to colour shapes on a different colour background and, last but not least, how Smartboard Notebook resources can be imported into Powerpoint presentations. I then decided to give up on my original idea to export our many powerpoints into notebook and replace it with my new plan: keeping the best features and ideas from our powerpoint presentations and importing links to more interactive Notebook activities into them. The types of Notebook activities I am currently considering will be drag and drop activities to start with.

I have also just noticed more training resources by Jose Picardo on his brilliant blog, Box of Tricks. My aim will now be to put at least 2 of these great ideas in practice for next week!

Social Bookmarking: My favourite Diigo features

With Diigo, you can highlight the web and add sticky notes too. You can also access and search your findings from any computers as well as create groups to pool resources for specific projects.

Enticed by all the positive comments from my twitter network and despite being a fan of del.icio.us, I recently decided to give Diigo a try. Last year, I was already looking at Diigo as an alternative to del.icio.us but I am now convinced that del.icio.us and Diigo can really be the perfect partners.

After downloading the Diigo toolbar, I transferred all my del.icio.us bookmarks to Diigo but decided to keep both to still be able to consult the bookmark recommendations from my del.icio.us network.

I have now set up Diigo to save all bookmarks to del.icio.us too, which was very straight-forward. I discovered that the automatic saves were not possible from del.icio.us to Diigo but saving my bookmarks from Diigo to del.icio.us meant that I did not have alter the tags published on My Languages blog.

So what is bigger and better?

I like the fact the each Diigo user has a profile, which makes networking a lot easier and personal. There is also a facility to join groups with similar interests in order to share bookmarks and directly send messages to “friends”. Yours and your friends’ recent bookmarks are listed as well as a list of recent visitors to your profile. The bookmarks can be public, private, tagged and untagged and there is a facility to share them as well as comments about them with friends and different groups.

Diigo groups are god to share resources and good practice. They are made up of people who choose to join others who have common interests like the use of web 2.0 in education, specific subjects etc… A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private.

A great feature I have not tried yet is "Lists", which provides another way to organize bookmarks. In “Lists” you can arrange and re-arrange the sequence of the items in the list by simple drag-and-drop, and by separating the items into sections. With one click, you can also easily turn a list into an interactive slideshow using our WebSlides. Now, that is worth a try…
Other users’ list can also be consulted and are arranged by topic, which is very user-friendly.

The tags can be sorted by my usage and by community usage and are also a way to connect with people with similar interests. Likewise, the reader community for your favourite sites can be checked out easily and this can also be a way to enlarge your circle of “friends”. You can also Subscribe to the most recent bookmarks by tags, sites, or users, which is a great way to keep track of the latest information on topics you are interested in.

Last but not least, I have noticed how well Diigo works with twitter and some people who request to be friends on Diigo first can end up being part of your twitter network as well.

For more research, check out my short collection of Diigo bookmarks and join me on Diigo to recommend more bookmarks to introduce Diigo to my colleagues!

The IWB Challenge: Week 2

The IWB challenge with Jess McCulloch carries on…

The sound on my whiteboard got fixed on Tuesday, so I was able to use it for a listening comprehension activity. Nothing unusual here apart from the quality of sound and the possibility to combine it with extra prompts “frozen” on the board while the sound file is playing-lots of opportunities for differentiation ….

I also tried out the Word Magnets programme with the IWB. Word Magnets is free and can be used to practise word or letter order through drag and drop exercises on the IWB.

You need to type in your phrase or word with appropriate gaps, click 'Next' and let Word Magnets do the rest. You can also type accented vocabulary in Word first and then copy and paste it across. As the colour and size of the magnets can be edited, you can colour-code parts of a sentence or parts of a word like prefixes or suffixes.

The only issue was that I was not able to upload the words beforehand, so I used this as a “warm up" activity rather than a proper starter. I included the Url on a powerpoint slide and used it to input the key words to be put back in order while students were copying their lesson objectives from the previous frozen slide.

I have also looked into getting students to use the onscreen keyboard for such activities but felt that a lot of student training was still needed as these activities are often affected by the orientation of the board.

The students liked the activity but I felt that it was difficult to ensure complete engagement from all students. Drag and drop activities like the ones with Word Magnet should really support other kinaesthetic pair activities in the classroom-e.g. students do the activity with dominoes made out of card and only come to the board the model their or the correct answer.

I did look at Notebook and discussed useful features with my colleagues. The gallery has a lot of resources like a scrolling heading that can remind students of lesson objectives-or number of days before the exam!-, templates for questions and answers games a spinner and a timer.

I managed to design very basic drag and drop exercises but was unable to import powerpoint into Notebook, which is what I wanted to do in order to develop the interactivity of all the powerpoint resources we have already available. I put the question to my Twitter network and lots of advice and trouble-shooting links were suggested to me. One of the reason why the powerpoint presentations could not open in notebook could be that they contain pictures and they are large documents.

Next week, I will need to develop my knowledge of what are transferable features from powerpoint to Notebook and what features are unique to Notebook… and more importantly, how they can translate into more interactive and engaging activities in the classroom.

New Secondary Curriculum Regional Subject Briefing for Languages, 9th April 2008, Liverpool.

My previous post on “Compelling Language Learning” described the kind of changes that could be implemented by using the increased flexibility offered by the new Programme of Study (PoS).

Throughout the presentations and workshops, I liked the fact that our subject was referred to as “Languages” although there are still many references to “MFL” in a lot of official documents. I still think that LOTE, Languages Other Than English, the acronym used in Australia is far more inclusive than our old “MFL”. I think “Languages” is a better alternative as it also includes “community languages” without discriminating or showing some kind of priority order. However, there is still a lot of work to be done to raise the linguistic self-esteem of many of our bilingual students…

At the Liverpool Briefing I attended, two main approaches were presented:

The “inside” approach:

· Building PLTS (Personal Learning and Thinking Skills) and other cross-curricular dimensions into planning
· Making connections with other subjects
· Exploring alternative ways of organising learning e.g. intensive learning, block of lessons, every student to visit a foreign country by the end of KS3…

The “outside” approach:

· Co-delivering activities with other subjects
· Ensuring an input from languages in all new initiatives
· Taking the lead on a dimension or skill
· Establishing a Unique Selling Point (USP) for languages within the whole school e.g. global dimension, identity & cultural diversity, thinking skills, creativity, work-related learning

The briefing then tried to refocus on practical auditing and target-setting in order to move things forward:

· What are we trying to achieve?
· How do we organise learning?
· How well are we achieving our aims?

The opportunities were highlighted as:

· Be creative
· Revitalise/ raise the profile of languages
· Increase motivation and uptake at KS4
· Get away from topic-based learning
· Promote the relevance of languages
· Use cross-curricular approaches as a way to develop transferable skills.

There were also a few concerns:

· Time to deliver and plan
· Impact on KS4
· Quality of skills and knowledge needed to cross-curricular delivery

The delegates were provided with a toolkit to organise the plans ahead and the materials were extremely useful to clarify the situation and highlight possible next steps in planning for the changes.

I was also very interested to see how cross-curricular and other approaches to avoid word level work in Year 7 could be used as a way to ease transition issues at the beginning of KS2 and avoid de-motivation in students who have had substantial exposure to a language at KS2 . All the materials given to delegates are to be found here and the case studies and ideas by Lynne West and Martine Pillette are very relevant to what I feel should be our priority in the short and medium term.