I was privileged to be asked to speak at the Primary Language Show once more this year. Having presented last year on El Carnaval de los Animales and You and Youtube, this year I had two new topics on which to speak.
The first of my presentations was entitled
Audaciously using Voices to make Voki!
During the session I aimed to explain how Audacity, Voki and Voicethread work, and how they can be used to enhance learning in the Primary Language Classroom. I gave examples from my classroom, made a Voki there and then and also drew ideas from others including Esther Mercier and Royds School.
Below is a Slidecast of my presentation, and here's a link to further resources to help you - a guide to making Voki, embedding on a Wiki and notes on all 3 tools - and others - including tutorials!
This evening I will presenting at Teachmeet EdTechRoundup on the above subject, sharing how I use sound recording in my classroom and suggesting why it is such a valuable tool.
Here are some references / notes that go with what I will (might?) say!
I had the pleasure of delivering the Next steps in ICT for the Primary Language Classroom at University of Cumbria in Lancaster on Tuesday. I had delivered the same in Cambridge last month, and whilst the presentations were identical, the days were quite different with the delegates taking a greater lead this time in guiding where we went. That always keeps you on your toes!
Below are my presentations from the day - you can also find these on the event wiki which was set up for us to 'play around'.
Thank you to my 6 'victims' as I referred to them on Twitter; to my Tweetmates who responded to my request to say hello; and to CILT for giving me this opportunity to share my enthusiasm for ICT and Primary Languages with others.
Following on from my post on Thursday about Teachmeet ASN-SEN, I have now extracted the audio from my very brief presentation using Audacity and Soundflower, levelled it with the Levelator, edited it to remove the numerous 'ums' and published as episode 5 of my podcast - )Lisibo talks! Feeling very proud of myself (and I can now recognise the wave pattern of an 'um'!
Make sure you catch the replay of the whole meeting though as it is well worth listening to the other presenters who were brilliant! See for yourself below - and watch here.
On Tuesday I made my way to Cambridge for the second time in four days to deliver a day's training on behalf of CILT at Anglia Ruskin University.
The course was entitled NEXT STEPS IN ICT FOR THE PRIMARY LANGUAGE CLASSROOM and promised to address collaborative working, whole class ICT, digital voicerecording and assessment amongst other things.
I had a lovely day with the delegates and hope that they all went away with one or to things to try out in their classrooms - there was great enthusiasm for wikis and Voki, and TTS should expect a few orders for their sound recording products in the near future - especially as I need a new Easispeak as I seem to have left mine behind :O(
I made a wiki for the event on which I've put all my presentations and also as a place for the delegates to 'play around' with using wikis. I did record the sessions - mostly!- but in the afternoon we went off at a tangent and the audio won't fit my presentations so i won't be making slidecasts of everything. However, I have put the presentations below as they are full of hyperlinks to useful resources.
Hope you find it useful!
And if you want to go on the course, it is repeated in Lancaster on 19th May. Contact CILT for more details!
NB the first slideshow actually starts on slide 18 as slide 22 was triggered to the first 20 slides as examples!
A quick update on the presentations from the Primary Language Show in Liverpool. Last week I published my presentations Join El Carnaval de los Animales and You and Youtube via Slideshare, and embedded them on my blog with other resources from the talks.
I recorded the sessions on my trusty 'Toblerone' aka my iRiver, and, as I was off work with a sick son this Thursday, I had time to edit the audio using Audacity and the Levelator. I then linked the audio to my Slideshare, synched it to the presentation and published it on Slideshare as a Slidecast. So if you now go to the blogposts, or to my Slideshare page, you will get the audio too! Magic!
Today I was supposed to be in Leicester speaking about eTwinning and the potential of using Voki, Voicethread and Audacity in projects. However, the snow got in the way so I'm not there but at home. I sent my presentation and notes to Jenny from the British Council so those brave souls that made it could have a look at what I might have said.
Below you will find all that I would have presented today given the chance.
And here's the slideshare related to Whitehouse Common's awardwinning project - if you want to see examples of the sort of things we did, leave me a message and I'll upload some of those too.
Yesterday saw a repeat of the Primary Languages Conference that was held in Coventry in June, this time in Bromsgrove to cover the South of the region.
Held in the lovely Bromsgrove Hilton, we were treated to a lovely lunch (always important on a training day!) as well as some great sessions on such things as Numeracy and MFL, Parachute games, Music and MFL and The International Dimension.
Eight lucky individuals took part in an Animation workshop with Oscar Stringer and had great fun producing short animations in just over an hour and half. Thanks to the British Council eTwinning, the lucky few took away their animations and Oscar's animation PDF on a memory stick! :o)
I delivered a session on Exciting ICT in the PLL Classroom, looking at delicious, Voki, Voicethread and Audacity. As promised, the presentation and notes are below for those who attended and also for those who didn't!
And the day ended with the lovely Steven Fawkes of ALL once more stunning and inspiring us all with his ideas on Performance and Motivation, culminating in the performance of La Banane, a new and innovative take on Kylie's Can't get you out of my head!!
And I won a lovely soft Spanish calendar in the raffle courtesy of Little Linguist. I eagerly await its arrival! :o)
As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm currently in Spain, in Madrid at a bilateral eTwinning meeting for Spanish and English teachers looking for partners - for eTwinning projects.
The meeting is coming to an end today after three days of frantic activity as teachers from both countries really threw themselves into the task of making friends and influencing one another. After a treasure hunt around the sites of central Madrid, numerous three course meals and several copas de vino, everyone has found a partner or partners, and begun to formulate project ideas. So it's been a very successful meeting - and some of the project ideas that people are sharing as I type are really interesting and creative!
One partnership are going to use digital storytelling and video to share talents between their schools with pupils acting as a Simon Cowell and judging the talents of their partner pupils.
Another group are planning on looking at festivals and cultural events along the lines of 'similar but different' - I know that this type of project leads pupils to not only learn about their partners' culture but also to reflect on their own!
'One liners' will be based around a 'guessing game' involving proverbs in Spanish and English, with the partners schools exchanging one line each week that will be displayed for the pupils who will work out / guess what it means. The partners hope that this will lead to discussion of the imagery of proverbs and a comparison of similarities and differences. Apparently this idea was formulated yesterday in the middle of the session I delivered on Voki Voicethread and Audacity in eTwinning after I shared the Voicethread highlighted in the previous post called What could it mean? :o)
Another group were inspired to create a NING network in my session (and I only mentioned those in passing!) and are planning on a monthly Voicethread activity about the City of the Future - environment, culture, lifestyle etc.
I've had some very interesting conversations over these few days about languages and technology, and also about the use of technology in general. One delegate told me on the first night that he hated technology, couldn't do anything technological and that his own children were banned from using computers as they are 'evil'. Mmm! I suggested that he might like to learn how ICT works alongside his children, thus knowing what they were doing and learning at the same time, and we had a discussion about educating rather than banning but didn't seem overly swayed by my argument! So I took that as a challenge for my session and was pleased as punch when he made a Voki in my session and declared that perhaps he could do something after all. And in the report back, he's just suggested using online Playstation competitions as a way of maintaining and establishing links between the schools. :O)
Here's my presentation below - and the notes I made too. You can't put Keynote presentations in Slideshare or Pages documents in DocStoc so the formatting is a little odd as I had to export it as .ppt and .doc :O(
I attended a really interesting session on Digital voice recorders delivered by Kath Holton from Argoed High School.
She began by talking about her criteria for a good digital voice recorder -
high quality - recording and manufacture
ease of uploading eg via USB
good internal microphone
the type of file it records eg mp3 is best as can be downloaded onto pupils’ iPods and mp3 players
ease of access for staff and pupils
robust
She suggested a number of suitable DVRs and referred us to Joe’s blog to see his ideas on the subject!
She then shared how she used digital voice recorders in her MFL classes in several ways.
Firstly, she used it for pupils to practice for GCSE. Pupils could record their response to questions / their presentations for their teachers to hear and assess when convenient, and also to provide a record that could be listened to not only by the pupil, but also by others - if the pupil has given permission. In addition, teachers recorded revision material in this way. The pupil response to this was very positive as it gave them the possibility to listen/revise wherever was convenient - on their phone, iPod, or stereo etc.
A second use was to record evidence of KS3 conversations and speaking activiites. Each of the three teachers at the school have three DVRs. Pupils are given the recorder and allowed to go out inot the corridor to record their pairwork. At the end of the lesson, the teacher downloads these onto her memory stick and can listen to, assess the audio files before keeping them as evidence. Kath advised that it’s important to remind pupils to state their name at the start of the recordings to save time trying to work out who is talking.
These files can also be used as starters in the next lesson with an AfL focus - pupils discussing stars and wishes on the class focus of, say, pronunciation. And the same files can also be used by staff for moderation purposes , allowing discussion of levelling etc.
Kath then went on to talk about the storage of files in a Wetpaint wiki, thus enabling pupils and staff to upload to a single space. she had previously tried a blog but felt that the wiki was better as it allows more freedom.
The focus then moved to the use of Voki with her pupils. She has made an account but her pupils do not have one - she encourages them to respond to her Voki using the comment button and text to speech. I found this really interesting as I had not discovered this feature (you think you know all about a tool...) You can leave a comment by clicking on the comment button and choosing to use an existing Voki or make your own. Kath encourages the pupils to do this in their time, as the making of the Voki can take time!! But she has found this to be a very successful activity with pupils ‘showing off’ in a way that they may feel uncomfortable doing in class. Kath has even had Voki from parents who have wanted to join in!
Kath finished off by mentioning Quizlet - www.quizlet.com a free tool that she uses to practice vocabulary, and then sharing an anecdote about giving pupils ownership of their work - by using their sound effects as a ‘highlighter’ of key concepts in presentations, they feel that the task is personal to them.
The great news is that Joe has interviewed Kath and you too can hear what Kath has to say about DVR as well as many other things by listening to the audio and reading the notes here. You can also catch Kath on the CILT Cymru DVD in the ICT section.
Really interesting stuff. I’ve used Audacity so far to record pupils - problematic as there is a lot of classroom noise and I really don’t like them lugging the laptops out in to the corridor. But a DVR would be a different story... wonder if ICT has spent its budget yet?? ;o)
Not the bumper crop we had hoped to post but we did manage to finish three despite crashing laptops, intermittent Internet connection and microphones that wouldn't work!
I'm just showing 6VH how to get around our little problem with Voki not recording directly by using Audacity. So brace yourself for lots of Voki coming at you this afternoon ;o)
Thanks to Zara in 5SD for letting me use her sound file to demonstrate!
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
Educator and consultant, passionate about creative teaching and learning using technology.
Director Lisibo Ltd.
Apple Distinguished Educator and Apple Education Mentor.
eTwinning Ambassador.
