coucoucircus.org - Bienvenue This site gives you access to the theme tunes and lyrics of hundreds of French TV programmes, in particular a lot of children's cartoon series.
Flash Video Big Books This is a great site for anyone interested in using story telling as a key component of their courses. Some free stuff but the books you have to buy are pretty cheap and excellent quality. Highly recommended.
Wordle - Create word clouds This is a fantastic little site for anyone wanting to be creative with Language. It creates key word diagrams on any topic in an arty way. It is a great way to introduce a topic or allow kids to create a keyword list to help them prepare for a speaking test
Just a bit of a fun Christmas greeting to all friends and colleagues out there. Can you identify which English dialect is in which of these sentences? What was the original message?
Your choices are:
a) Scouse d) Geordie g) Dead posh (ie: me)
b) Irish e) Yorkshire h) Brummie
c) Scots f) Cockney i) Ali G street
1) Yav a really chuffed christmas with all bostin' wishes ter all ar dear an' loony friends afar an' wide.
2) 'uv a dead made-up Crimbo wi' all beesknees wishes ter all us dear and lewny friends far and wide.
3) Hev a deed happy christmas wi' aaal best wishes tuh aaal wor hinny an' loony friends far an' wide.
4) Hae a pure canty christmas wi' aw best wishes tae aw uir hen an' loony friends far an' wide.
5) Av eur chuffin' 'appy christmas wi' orl best wishes ta orl wee eh up 'n loony friends far 'n wide.
6) As da fe real chuffed christmas wiv all fittest wishes to all our me main geeza an' loony boys far an' wide.
7)
'av a really 'appy christmas wi' al' best wishes ter al' our dear an' loony lads far an' wide
8)
'ave a 'eaven and 'ell 'appy christmas wif aw Mae West Pots And Dishes ter aw our dear and loony friends far and duck 'n' dive.
9)
Have ah hairlairh jolly christmas with all mwah mwah sweetie to all our deaaar and loohny friends faaar and wide. Goodness me!
When I was doing my PGCE training many moons ago, my tutor used to salivate over the concept of team teaching. We were taken to a demonstration lesson in a local school and I have to say I was impressed.
Since that time I have never been in a school where this was practised. However, it has always remained an idea that has stuck with me.
I have never felt that teachers are naturally programmed to work alone. Indeed the classroom isolation necessitated by what I see as an artificial construct of separate subject disciplines is one of the key factors that lead to teacher depression, burnout and disaffection. I wonder how many good colleagues have been lost to the profession because of this. In my own journey, I think it was a major factor in my decision to quit secondary teaching.
How can it be right that most of my generation of teachers have spent the majority of their classroom lives in splendid isolation whilst encouraging the pupils we teach to work in pairs, groups, conduct peer assessment and aspire to assimilate all the attributes of good team players?
Fortunately, the internet has facilitated an explosion in the sharing of ideas amongst peoples sharing a common interest, teachers especially. No-one need now feel isolated and opportunities are growing to attend online 'meetings', Teachmeets and the like, where we can connect to amazing colleagues across the curriculum with inspirational ideas. I wonder how long it will be before this new hub of inter-disciplinary connections begins to filter much more strongly back into the organisational structures of our schools?
As I work in primary schools now where a cross curricular approach is the norm, and as I explore the obvious links language learning has with other subject areas at KS3 such as music and drama, I was wondering whether there are schools out there who are actively pursuing the concept of team teaching across different subjects. If there are, please contact me to let me know.
I might even be tempted to return to the secondary sector ... now there is a scary thought to be resisted!
This link will take you to a page on the online dictionary WordReference which explains how you can add some bookmarks to your Favourites in the Firefox browser. Once installed all you have to do is type the short cut in the browser tool box to quickly translate words or conjugate verbs.This could be a really useful tool to help your students. the vocab tool is available for Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Unfortunately there is only a conjugation feature for French, Italian and Spanish verbs.
There is a similar toolbar feature for Google Chrome
If you want some ammunition to explain why you feel that using new technologies is a vital part of your teaching, play this! The statistics are mind-boggling.
And 25 years ago, I was looked at rather oddly for wanting to dust down a BBC micro computer and try and use it in the classroom !
Updates A colleague kindly pointed out that there were a couple of errors in the text of the powerpoint which I have now corrected in the download file. Slide 34 'Kir Royale' not just Kir and slides 49 and 55 'treize' for 'trieze' a typo.
I have also added a simplified version of the same quiz with a few new elements
Following on from my earlier post on using a scrolling text in powerpoint, here is a French Christmas quiz which was kindly shared by a colleague on the Yahoo Mfl resources forum (which by the way will save you as a language teacher hours of time as colleagues here are very generous with time, support and bags of free resources).
I have adapted it so that all of the questions appear on the slideshow but they only appear when the text the pupils are studying has disappeared and the questions then appear as scrolling text across the bottom of the screen. It puts a time pressure on the pupils to read the text, focus on the key detail and anticipate the kind of questions they might be asked. I played it with pupils working as a pair but in competition with each other. They had to write the answers down and after every 3 or 4 slides we would check the answers as a class.
This worked very well with pupils in yrs 5 and 6 at a primary school and I am sure you could adapt it to work with older groups, perhaps putting more of the slides into French.
There is too much material here for one lesson so you may need to shorten it to suit your needs. The later slides do include some ideas on how to exploit the 'find the French for ...' type of question.
Watch a video demonstration of how it works on this video here.
You can download the powerpoint here. If you are prompted to allow macros when you open it, you can block them as there are none attached to this powerpoint. I have no idea why this message pops up! An annoyance of ppt 2003 ...
Here is a Slideshare link to give you an idea of the content but Slideshare will not demo a preview of the animated scroll bar questions or triggers I have used.
I hope I can put up a video explaining a bit more how these features are created. For now you can simply play around with the ideas. Copy any of the slides whose features you want to use in any other presentation you are working on and adapt the pictures and text for your own ends.
You could use these ideas to get pupils focusing on and interacting with any topic you are teaching at any level across the curriculum so please feel free to share this post with other colleagues on your schools. You can use the "Tell a friend" widget to the left to pass a link on.
I'm posting a link to a page on a site called 'powerpoint heaven'.
I thought this scrolling text idea was a neat way of adding a visual effect to a teaching presentation. I am going to post an example of how you can modify this to create a simple set of questions to encourage pupils to take in information and engage with your slides. I will be adapting a Christmas quiz I downloaded from the yahoo mfl resources forum. That's coming up later on today.
"Tutorial on creating a Scrolling Ticker In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a Scrolling News Ticker which can be placed at the bottom of the slide for you to display any news and information."
I was really heartened to see this post from Joe Dale's site today. The post profiles some trainee teachers at Liverpool Hope University being challenged to write their own lyrics to some well known pop songs and coming up with the goods.
I hope all teacher training courses put some element of teaching their students how to lead singing in their lessons. You have to have this skill and it needs to be taught, you don't just turn up in a classroom and put on a video/CD and make it work.
Well done to the teachers and students on this course.
Skype is a free and easy way for teachers to open up their classroom and their students to a world way beyond their campus. With Skype, students can learn from other students, connect with other cultures, and expand their knowledge in amazing ways. Teachers and parents can also benefit from Skype in the classroom. Read below to learn how you can take advantage of the power of Skype in your classroom.
Following on from yesterday's post on using macros in Word, this video explains how you might exploit this vowel macro in Microsoft Word to do some listening work with a text on Christmas in France. If you have a KS4/5 class next week and are stuck for something to do, this could plug a gap!
Again, whilst the language here is for pupils aged 15 +, the idea could be adapted for much simpler texts and sound files at a simpler level.
My thanks to the person who tweeted the original source material for the sound file and text, and thanks to the host site at ie.languages.com
This is the original sound file
and an extract from the Word file. Download both in the zip file below.
Here is the video link. Right click to open in a new browser window or download.
The link from the mp3 to the media player embedded in the Word document might be broken but there is an explanation at the end of the video of how to re-insert it if you wish. Otherwise just play the mp3 in your own media player.
Have fun!
Joyeux Noël à tous mes collègues qui travaillent si dur dans des sections de langues partout au Royaume Uni et ailleurs!
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