Every time I have heard Drew Buddie speak, I have been amused, informed and challenged to go away and investigate - and this time was no exception. Drew aka @digitalmaverick delivered a session on Web2.0 tools in his own inimitable style, taking his inspiration from Alan Levine aka CogDogBlog / CogDogRoo and his 50 ways to tell a story. You can find a full list on the CogDogRoo wiki but we only had time to look a few of them including Bubbleshare, Ourstory.com, Animoto and Kerpoof.
With @pj23harry, @jokingswear@orunner and @lisibo tweeting proceedings, it was unsurprising that Twitter was explored in some depth with most of the session attendees signing up for accounts and starting to befriend one another. Drew encouraged us all to write our Twitter names on or name badges so that we would be able to recognise who had a Twitter profile and follow them. This fitted well with the big screen in the hall that displayed all tweets to @iowconference08, the conference Twitter account.
We also had a look at Voki and discussed how it might be used, and touched on Voicethread, before thinking about wikis and blogs. Drew showed people how to sign up for a Blogger blog, and also mentioned NING but as blogs and NING are blocked on IoW, that was something that people had to go away to investigate further.
Although I knew about many of these sites and tools, it was good to be reminded of them and offered ideas for using them. It was also great that people chipped in little bits of information that they had to share, and that included people via Twitter. And of course, the entertainment factor was high, especially as the master computer for the room was at the back and Drew had to keep running up and down the room to operate things until he coopted Paul Harrington into doing it for him ;o)
On Monday, Comenius West Midlands held its Primary Languages Conference at the Novotel in Wolverhampton. Sandwiched between keynotes by Joe Brown from CILT that involved song rhyme and lots of action, and Steven Fawkes from ALL who thrilled us with his 'Banane', delegates had to choose sessions from a range including :
It's magic!
International Perspective
Let's play - Language games and activities for the playground.
Numeracy through Languages
Animation
Italian for the Primary classroom - a cross curricular approach.
Music and songs in the Primary classroom
Animation in the languages classroom (double session)
Creative use of ICT
A tricky choice for many, judging from the feedback at the end of the day! I for one will be emailing presenters for notes from their sessions as I was presenting and missed out on all of the sessions!
Actually, I didn't completely miss out as I was able to attend the plenaries and also began the day by acting as 'roadie' for Oscar Stringer as he presented a whistle stop double session on animation from idea through planning, modelling, filming, adding finishing touches and publishing. Phew! In a very short time (less that two hours), the participants made short films in French and Spanish which can be viewed below and on his NING network. Just shows what you can do in a short time with good instruction, imagination and a bit of plasticine. ;o)
Definitely inspired me! So much so that, after a quick chat with Oscar, I decided to have a go with my Year 4 class this week. More of that in a later post!
My session was entitled Creative use of ICT and centred on the use of some tools that i thnk are useful to enhance and enable PLL.
The idea had been to introduce delegates to Voki, Voicethread, Audacity and Photostory, explain how I've used them in my classroom, and then let delegates have a go at using one of the tools. I'd prepared notes for people that went into everyone's pack so those who couldn't attend were able to benefit too, and these pointed to online tutorials for the tools as well as examples from my experience and research. I'd also requested a laptop between two to be provided with a microphone and Internet access, and Audacity and Photostory3 uploaded ready. I'd prepared a Voicethread and Voki account for the day so all outcomes could be saved together for future reference, and I'd also added some examples to get people started.
Best laid plans and all! There were three laptops provided, the speakers didn't work, and Internet access was at best infuriatingly slow and at worst non-existent (at 20€ per laptop, I hope the orgnisers got a refund!) Anyhow, it left me rather embarrassed as my examples took an age to load (Voki) or didn't play sound (Voicethread AND Voki at times) - next tie I'll save them for offline access using Camtasia or similar - and I've found that there is a facility on Voicethread now to save for offline access.
However, I did manage to highlight the use of del.icio.us which i hadn't intended to mention but proved to be one of the most popular ideas with delegates. My account of how I use Audacity led to lots of smiles and there was a general hum of interest as I made a Photostory in three minutes.
I must say was a little disheartened by the first session, especially as I had to repeat it after lunch, but several people came up to me and seemed to be buzzing about something I'd shared, so I went into the repeat feeling a little more confident, especially as I was prepared for the problems this time! The make up of the group was different this time and they asked lots of questions - I think they were the G&T group ;o)
At the end of the afternoon when the evaluations were returned, I was rather surprised, and very pleased as well!- to read several who said things like
"The ICT session was the best bit!' "Brilliant session on ICT - can you do a whole session on Voicethread and podcasting next time please?" "the notes were so useful - I'm going to check them out on del.icio.us - and I'm going to tell my staff about it too"
If you want to have the notes, see below. and all the sites / references can be found on my del.icio.us account - http:del.icio.us/lisibo/june22
I blogged about this great site a while back - but thought I'd mention it again, and post a picture of MY Wildself as I intend to mention it tomorrow when I speak about Using ICT in the Primary Language Classroom for Comenius West Midlands in Wolverhampton, and also as I mentioned it in my post about El Carnaval de los Animales.
So here's Lisibo - the Rein-pol-conda-ger-guin-peacock (always said I was a bit mixed up )
As I mentioned in my post on Unit 11, my idea is to use the image above as the stimulus for descriptive writing. Pupils could describe
the physical attributes of their Wild self
the character traits that their Wild self displays
the environment in which it lives
the food it eats
So - my example would be: Me llamo Lisibo. Tengo la cabeza de una niña. Tengo las orejas de un oso polar y las cuernas de un reno. Tengo la lengua larga de una anaconda. Tengo los brazos de un tigre y el cuerpo y piernas de un pinguino. Y tengo la cola muy bonita de un pavo real. Soy simpática y cariñosa pero a veces soy feroz. Me gusta el sol aunque tengo que sentarme en un palo de hielo porque mi trasero es de pinguino ;o) Como las hormigas y los gusanos con la lengua, y mi comida preferida es una hamburguesa.
There are probably other things you could add - feel free to add suggestions to the comments below. I like it when you talk back!
I had the privilege to speak at Tile Hill Wood School andLanguage College on Thursday evening. I was really pleased to be asked by Ana Neofitou, Head of Languages, who I've met a couple of times at Language World and other more local conferences, and Jo Redford who is Assistant Head and who I met in Oxford this year when she introduced The ALL London Show and Tell session in which I participated.
My session was the last of three sessions for Primary teachers in teaching and learning Primary Languages. Previously the group of about 40 teachers had been working in language specific groups and focusing on vocabulary for topics such as sport and animals. My session, entitled Top tips for Primary Languages, aimed to give them an insight into how to deliver PL in an engaging way, making use of free resources and easily acquired skills. I enjoyed expanding on my presentation from Oxford (you can see and listen to it in this slidecast) which I delivered there in 10 minutes - just over an hour was still too short, but I was happier! I just get so excited that I could talk for hours!
Below is the presentation, and also the notes I made for delegates so that there wasn't too much mad scribbling as I gabbled away! Even as a standalone document, I think you can see what I'm trying to say!
You may have noticed that I'm a fan of 'pretty things' - avatars, Flickr photos, widgits etc - and also of words (current favourites include kerpoof as said by Drew Buddie) so when Wordle was recommended in last night's EdTechRoundup Flashmeeting, and I then saw a post by Langwitches in my Google Reader telling me that 'Wordle produces 'beautiful word clouds'', my interest was piqued.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
I had a little go at making some. You can use your own - or someone else's del.icio.us username to create a cloud - here's one for http://del.icio.us/lisibo and another for http://del.icio.us/whitehousecommon (my school del.icio.us account)
I love these visual representations of my bookmarks as they highlight the most popular tags so clearly(the text size for each word is related to the number of times it appears) and it's pleasing to see that the focus of my tagging is where I thought it was ;o)
You can also input random words to create a cloud. So I tried pasting my last blog post into the text box and came out with this - There are some other great examples in the Wordle gallery including: How to survive a Zombie attack
Here's a French one - very topical too - Le Coupe d'Europe
and a Spanish one - Inteligencia emocional
I think these are great fun and could be used in the classroom as a way of presenting information e.g. new vocabulary such as food and drink, things based on popularity when doing likes and dislikes as well as creating visual poems and stories. And how about inputting some text that children have written and graphically showing them how many times the word 'said' or 'went' appear - that should bring the point home ;o)
Educator and consultant, passionate about creative teaching and learning using technology.
Director Lisibo Ltd.
Apple Distinguished Educator and Apple Education Mentor.
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