Blog de la Señora Ashton-Creighton

In today’s less you will be creating the first part of movie about where you live using Windows Movie Maker. Your movie should be about two minutes long, which means that you will have to speak in Spanish for about two minutes.

For homework you were asked to take at least 10 photographs of your area and your home. For each of these pictures you will be expected to speak at least 4 sentences. Remember what the examiner is looking for in your speaking test:

1. Ability to express opinion
2. Ability to go beyond a mininum response – saying more stuff (relevant stuff , at that)
3. Good pronunciation.

Today, you are not going to record what will say but you will practise it. Your homework will be to continue practising your presentation because you will be allowed 5minutes during the next lesson to produce the audio and a further 10 minutes to complete the production.

Use your time wisely today.

Well, I am here having my car in for its first service and while I waited I thought I would blog. It’s been a long time since I have done so but it is really difficult to fit it into your schedule and when you do have time it does not always coincide with your desire to “share with the world.”

Anyway, I am very worried about my research project ! Talk about putting all my eggs in one basket! I am supposed to be inviestigating the imapct of ICT on the speaking skills of year 10 students. The main part of my research revolved around the use of the Easi-Spea microphones and Audacity with a bit of goanimate and widows media thrown in. The whole idea was to use the mics during the speaking exercises that are a regular part of every lesson and to observe the willingness, motivation and if there was any increased participation that was effected. I also planned to use the goanimate sequences to get students to expand on their responses and to get the students to eventually produce their own movies on the areas where they live.

Unfortunately:

1. the main part of the project – the easi speak mics – remain undelivered. Something about them not being pleased with the quality of the mics that were received. As a result they returned them to the manufacturer and the delivery should have been with me before the end of term. Guess what…end of term, folks and no delivery. In the mean time we have usb mics but these, of course, are bound to a computer – we have five in total and I have 12 students – not a good recipe for pair work and it also removes the spontaneity aspect and require a lot more managing in terms of lesson time lost with logging in (5-7 minutes) and using the audacity programme. 
2. Illness has also plagued – with the winter virus – and this has thrown me off by a week…
3. The students created their own goanimate accounts but were not able to activitate as the activation link sent to their email would not…welll… activate!. The ICT team at school is yet to respond my requests of “what’s going on!” The whole point of the goanimate was that I would produce a cartoon with blank speech bubbles, they would copy into their accounts and then create the soundtrack….

Fortunately:

1. My year 11 groups (which are not part of the focus of the research) have thoroughly enjoyed using the Audacity software! They have used it to create their oral presentations. The French group have listened back to themselves and spotted errors in pronunciation and have improved on it. The Spanish group did the same -over two days – 15 students and 5 mics . On the second day, one student who had recorded on the first, and who is a reluctant learner, came to me and wanted to record her presentation again because “she really enjoyed it!” I said okay (as it was the last day of school) even though I was positive that she would be messing around in English. She didn’t!! She actually sat there practising her presentation over and over in Spanish.  I was really impressed. In the year 10 group (the focus) one student was heard to exclaim, ” I really want to get this for my home computer, this is so much fun!”

In conclusion, if I don’t get my research sorted out for the 16 Jan (the new deadline) at least I would have seen some ways in which ICT can be used in MFL speaking.

Anyway, they are almost finished with the servicing. The mechanic just came and said that I have a nail in the front tyre – so my reaction is eithe, “so how the hell did I get here without noticing?”, “did they put that nail there” or “thank God I had a service today!” I think I’ll take the latter.

Right, I am off to go finish cleaning the house for Christmas and then into central London – Southbank for some Christmas fayre (is that how you spell it?)

I am absolutely buzzing!! So much so that it’s my lunch break and I am taking the time from my (too short) 45 minute break to be able to submit this. My year 9s have been workin on ailments and we were moving forward to role plays at the pharmacy. For my plenary I created the comic strip and I placed some extra bubbles – so that the students could deviate from the role plays that we had done in the lesson. The result was amazing! Not only the motivation of this rather weak “top set”  more than half of whom are not continuing with Spanish, but quality of language that the students used blew  my mind. They recalled vocabulary and structures that I thought were long forgotten.

 This has definitely been a successful tool for the stimulation of dailogue.

Last night…

….I thought I would try to create a starter for my year 8 group. For the last two months, this group has been under the care of a PGCE student  so I needed to ascertain exactly where they were on the topic before I could move on. I wanted to do a memory game where the students would watch the video and at the end of the time, see how much vocabulary they could remember. The more able would be expected to produce full sentences with some extension.

So…

…I  went to freeplaymusic.com checked the terms and conditions and voilà… a sound track. I then decided to use the Pulp Motion software to help me create the movie. At the end I exported to Quick Time, looked at the product one last time and went to bed.

This morning…

…. Plugged in my USB and opened the document with Media Player Classic, blew it up to full screen and arggghhh!!! Unrecognisable images, poor resolution, unusable resource!!! Back up plan? Sentence sort activity…

Can anyone tell me what I should have done to preserve the quality of the images? Here it is below.

Well…! After an information-packed Saturday, I have gone away to try use some of the software. The one that I can see myself using immediately in my lessons is the Comic Life. I can see this as being extremely motivating for my lower ability students – they could be given the frames and the pictures and the theme (example Introductions) and they come up with the conversation bubbles. I am wondering if I can also imbed into the powerpoint presentation and record the students’ contributions…

I also see this tool as really enjoyable activity for the students to produce their own comics at the end of a module of work. Currently the year nines are working on a module on health. So, one group could do a comic on “At the doctors” the other “At the phramacy” and another on “A healthy lifestyle”. As most of the software we have been introduced to, if we would like students to use these tools we should ensure that the “content” of our subject area that we would like to get them to use is covered and that this technology is the icing on the cake or the fun factor. It is oh so easy that students would spend a full period on making sure that frame A is the perfect size and distance from frame B and at the end of the lesson all you have done is “Art” and no, in my case, Spanish/French.

Now that I have a bit of free time, after a three period oral stint, I thought I’d play around with inserting a you tube video clip.

Get a Voki now!

I have gotten home, taken off my shoes and thought I would get stuck in to actually use some of the packages that we met today.

Jack Russell mentioned that until we received Garage Band we could use Movie Maker. So, I thought I’d have a go. Nothing interesting, just using the default images and clips on my computer. Enjoy. My movie …NOT!!

Already I can see how I would be bale to use the application of the Garage/Movie maker for some presentations that we have in Powerpoint about Spanish – add a sound track and presto…! Something of interest. 

I have just attended a mini session by Tessa Ware on the “Use of Blogging in the classroom.” I am very excited by the prospect as I can see this having a major impact on the writing skills in MFL and it would also be invaluable in the use of the comments as peer assessment. Keeping in mind the upcoming links with the school in Madrid,  I can  also see this a key to the sharing of text between students. Blogging, however, is really not something that I see as being used in the classroom, but in fact it extends the classroom outwards – away from the physical walls to be used on the students’ own time. I would not think of using the blogs during teaching time but is a great way for fostering independent learning.

I have already hinted to my small year 10 French group that I would be looking for them to begin blogging – adding new pages to each blog for each module that is studied. My hope would be that students would comment on each other’s blog using the Edexcel criteria. On a larger scale, I would like to think of my top set year 8 students placing their end of module writing tasks online and being able to comment on each other’s work in the style of the teacher in an exercise of formative assessment.

I can envisage some obstacles, however, which have already been discussed in Tessa’s presentation – the technical difficulties. Do students have internet access at home? Russell Prue stated that74% of teenagers have broadband at home and that statistic increases in the city – I don’t believe that that holds true for the “inner city”. How many of my students will have computer access and if they don’t how do we create the computer access for them at school? When the use of the computer becomes compulsory and not an option as it currently is we need to make sure that this is catered for.

Ideally I would like to set up individual student blogs but, particularly with the ks3 online bullying possibilities would have to be assessed, wouldn’t it?

As Tessa said, this would have to be monitored and guided particularly in terms of the assessment the students would have to be schooled in the “one star-one wish” form of assessing that members of staff currently use.