¡Vámonos!

Technology in Modern Foreign Languages - A practitioner's perspective is a post by José Picardo in which he announces the online publication of a series of blog posts that originally appeared on his blog Box of Tricks over December/January, written by a wide variety of language practitioners about their experiences of and advice for using technology in the MFL classroom.

Posted by lisibo at 21:25 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, ICT, Jose Picardo, mfltips, new technologies

I love it when I open my Inbox and come across an email that points me to a new resource. I received one such email tonight and loved it so much that I had to blog it immediately.

Wallwisher is a site that allows you to add multiple short posts on a wall. As JimmyP says in his email -

It's got a lot of potential I think to encourage pupils to write in the
target language. The site lets you create a page or 'Wall' very
easily. You give the address of the page to the pupils and they double
click on the page and can then write a short post. They can even add a
picture/video although I haven't tried this yet. When you create the
page you can set up some restrictions in terms of viewing and posting.

Posted by lisibo at 20:14 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, ICT, literacy, online

Posted by lisibo at 22:05 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, glogster

eTwinning conference Prague 2009, originally uploaded by lisibo.

I've been blogging all weekend from the European eTwinning Conference in Prague on the special blog set up for the event. I've also been tweeting our activities when I've had a chance.

Thought I'd put some of the posts on ¡Vámonos! as well! If you're interested, there are many more posts by other delegates found on http://blog.eun.org/etwinningconference2009/

Posted by lisibo at 09:36 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, blogs, etwinning, Twitter

Many of you will know of Joe Dale and follow his marvellous blog, Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom. Joe is an SSAT Lead Practitioner and as part of his role, he delivers an SSAT seminar each year. This year he ran a day in Colchester on Blogging and Podcasting, and I am really pleased that he is going to repeat that day in the Midlands soon - on Thursday 29th January at Shirelands CLC to be precise.

As Joe says -

If you are interested in finding out more about the potential of blogging and podcasting to enhance language learning and offer personalised distance learning opportunities to your students, why not click here and download the flyer to apply to attend the course? It only costs £69 which includes lunch.

Posted by lisibo at 10:40 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, Joe Dale, podcasting, primary languages, secondary languages

I've mentioned EdTechRoundup on ¡Vámonos! before and have to say that I continue to be enlightened each Sunday night (when singing permits) by the chat about all things technological (and not so technological!) at the weekly Flashmeeting.

Therefore, I'm pleased to say that we've decided to share the conversations with others who cant attend or access the replay of the meeting, and today we've published the first of 'ETR Weekly' podcast in which we talk about starting out in the edublogosphere. You can listen to the podcast and see the show notes on the ETR blog - http://edtechroundup.com

Posted by lisibo at 20:20 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, edtechroundup, ideas, podcasts

6000 Views, originally uploaded by andrew_mrt1976.

Whilst Spain were playing Italy this evening, an exciting thing happened to my Hit counter on ¡Vámonos! - it topped 6000!

As it reached 4000 in April - 26th April to be precise, that's less than 2 months to amass another 2000 hits. I'm impressed!

In my 4000 hit post I said 'Here's to reaching 5000 by the end of the summer term' - seems I need to aim higher!

Thank you so much to everyone for coming back - I'll keep blogging as long as you keep reading :o)

Posted by lisibo at 22:33 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, counter

Whilst fiddling with my blog today, my hit counter reached the 4000 hits mark. Not quite as impressive as Joe Dale's 100,000 I know, but I'm still very pleased with 4000 since ¡Vámonos! started at the end of October 2007. Here's to reaching 5000 by the end of the summer term!

Unfortunately I was occupied by saving and reinstalling widgets when the counter tipped the magic 4000 so I didn't get a screen shot - so here's an image from Spell with Flickr , a site with which I love to play.

Posted by lisibo at 17:28 4 comments    

Labels: blogging, counter

After I posted Joe's quiz yesterday, I had an exchange of comments with Langwitch about how tricky it is was to name all the bloggers from their photos with so many people using avatars.

My obsession with widgets and avatars is well known (and well documented on this blog) but less is known about my love of quizzes and very competitive streak!

So, combining the two, here's my version. Let's see how 'Joe's best class' as José put it yesterday in a comment on Joe's post, you get on with this.

(apologies to those who I've missed - any more avatars to declare?)

Posted by lisibo at 18:53 5 comments    

Labels: avatars, blogging, Joe Dale, languages, puzzles

Joe Dale of Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom fame has been playing around with a new tool called MyStudiyo and come up with a quiz.
It's based on MFL bloggers - multiple choice with four names to choose from for each photograph, so even if you don't know the answer, you can guess.
Being a girly whirly swot, I got full marks - how will you fare?
PS I'm in it but the less said about the picture, the better ;o)

Posted by lisibo at 21:11 4 comments    

Labels: blogging, Joe Dale, puzzles

Twitter strikes again!

@acsutcliffe seems to be featuring a lot on ¡Vámonos! recently - perhaps it's because we're both language teachers. Except none of the Tweets have had anything to do with MFL! Anyhow, I saw the following last night -


Looked interesting so I investigated, reading the blog post Adam wrote and following the link to International Edubloggers.
I submitted my details, and lo! My badge (displayed above and right) arrived this morning, as did my details on the site. And I did make it to #22 - just pipped Alex Blagona!

It's interesting to see the other bloggers registered on the site - several I'll add to my Google reader. And registering also makes sense for me as it seems a good way of promoting my blog. Not something that I find comes naturally, but I've been thinking - if I've taken the time to blog it, I think it's worth reading so why not?

Posted by lisibo at 15:20 0 comments    

Labels: Adam Sutcliffe, Alex Blagona, badges, blogging

At 2.20pm today I Tweeted via my mobile -

'Tearing hair out with yr5 - perhaps rewriting Machado's Spanish poem Primavera was adventurous, but they only had to change 2 words!'

My words of desperation unfortunately did not arrive in the Twitterverse - Twitter seems to be having the sort of day I have - but by the end of the afternoon a new post had arrived on Vámonos proving that the lesson didn't end as badly as it might have done!

The Scheme of work for Year5 this half term is based around Unit 17 of the QCA KS2 Schemes for Spanish - 'El retorno de la primavera'. This covers the weather and seasons before looking at a poem by Machado called La Primavera and linking to the myth of Persephone. I'm trying to redo the KS2 scheme as I go along and thought I'd try out some of the QCA units to see what I thought - and also how the kids would like them!
Now, this particular class are lively and perhaps not your ideal 'guinea pigs' but nothing ventured...
The idea was to consider the poem La Primavera (not quite the same version but a lovely gerber daisy!), looking how we can work out what it means, and considering the rhythm and repetition, especially of the chorus

Posted by lisibo at 17:16 0 comments    

Labels: blogging, creative curriculum, spanish, wcps

The time has come to admit something I've tried to ignore and hide for a while - I am addicted to blogging! I've just taken a test and, by asking me about my blog habits it concluded that ...
81%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

• how often do you casually drop your blog into conversation?
• how many times a day do you 'pop by' your blog to check how many visitors it's had?
• how much time do you spend looking for bling for your blog?
• do you feel bereft if you can't look at your blog on a regular basis (Birmingham LA hasn't blocked blogs yet, but I did a course in Gloucester where they are blocked and was beside myself that I couldn't see ¡Vámonos!)

Posted by lisibo at 16:26 1 comments    

Labels: blogging

Checking my Google reader I came across the latest post by Jeff Utecht on his blog, The Thinking Stick.
In it, he relates how he has spent today teaching 9th graders about blogging -

The classes were each 80 minutes long…plenty of time to setup a blog, write a short blog post, learn about posts vs. pages, walk through how to manage comments, change themes, update options, change password, and have a discussion on the use of the blog.

Wow! He goes on to explain how he related blogging to Facebook, comparing their new blogs to Facebook pages, and the sidebar widgits to all the Applications you can add to your Facebook page. The language of Facebook was familiar to the students so it made perfect sense to them! That was the first thing that struck me - making things relevant.

The second was the fact that the teacher was in the room, and learning at the same time. It's a model I like - my best lessons have been when I've been learning with the kids - and particularly when they've been teaching me. I never tire of learning and hope my pupils are as eager to learn as me!

Jeff comments towards the end of his post-
'This is the reason why I love blogs, they open up a whole world of opportunities.'

I'd just read Ewan McIntosh's article in The Guardian as well in which he concludes
'The future (of using new technologies) is in teachers seeing for themselves what bounties await down this yellow brick road, before worrying about how they are going to bring Class 2C with them on Monday morning.'

I'm new to blogging and the like but I can see that the possibilities are endless. The kids need little persuading when I suggest using the latest tool I have discovered, and are learning without realising it much of the time.

For example, my 9 year old son had to do a topic on the Egyptians and decided to do half of it using Photostory3 - the quality and quantity of information he gave in his presentations was greater than he would normally have produced. And he learned how to use a new application - because he saw me doing it and it looked fun!

So, I'll keep learning and taking the advice of John Hunter quoted in Ewan's article -

Posted by lisibo at 16:02 1 comments    

Labels: blogging, education, Ewan McIntosh, Jeff Utecht., news