Inspiration and fascination from TED

The TED website provides a brilliant range of short videos on fascinating topics. Great for assemblies, class discussions, G&T students and generally getting your brain going again after a hard day's teaching! This one is on a subbject close to my heart: babies' language acquisition.

Revising for the orals with Photostory 3

It's a bit late for Year 11, I know. My Year 10s are preparing for end of year orals and have been using a multimedia approach to drum those conversation topics in.

The first stage was very conventional: write answers to questions on school, hand in, then type up the corrected version. Next, choose images from the net to reflect each of your answers. Drop these into Photostory 3 and add the questions as subtitles.

Now the more unusual bit: upload your answers to readthewords, choose one of the available French-speaking voices, and listen to your own answers. For students lacking in confidence this breaks the back of any pronunciation problems without the need for an unrealistic amount of time practising with the teacher. After a final rehearsal with me, the students then record their answers in Photostory, making a great resource to share with other students, mail home, or download onto a smartphone etc...

This took two 55 minutes lessons and two homeworks, and I'm looking forward to hearing the impact on their oral performances next week. The students certainly enjoyed making their short videos, and using speech simunlation as pronunciation support was excellent for boosting the independance of a bottom set.

Nice to feel new technologies can help us meet the old expectations of learning a certain amount of language by rote.

Grammar Queen

I picked up a feed a few days ago about xtranormal, a site that allows you to create animations using text to speech software (despite my good intentions I forgot to note whose blog pointed me in this direction: so thanks and apologies!) This site is really easy and fun to use and can cope with several languages and accents. My first experiment is aimed at getting my Year 10s to remember the basic rules and a few key forms of the perfect tense. I asked the group to write some questions and answers about forming the tense, and then typed their dialogue into the site. It is great fun choosing the camera angles, gestures and facial expressions. In episode two the French tutor demonstrates some of the verbs, and I'm going to invite my students to script episode 3, where our learner takes her first uncertain steps in the perfect. I think then I might invite students to invent another character our French learner can meet. The resulting videos can be posted on youtube, embedded in your blog or simply searched on xtranormal's site, which offers the usual possibilities of ratings, comments and remixes. Try it now while they are offering free credits.

Make a your own video from digital photos

Log on to Animoto to check this out and do listen to the soundtrack - the music they provide is pretty cool. Like baking bread - it doesn't take much actual work time but does take a while to upload and "render" into a video. Free for a 30 second clip. Great for a celebration of a visit or reinforcement of a topic, you can opt for the music or upload your own audio commentary. Check this one out to see what the Sixth Form got up to in Paris.

Cutting youself some slack: RSS

What is an RSS feed? If you're not sure and don't yet use a feedreader watch this video and follow the simple steps.

Scrummy social bookmarking for beginners

Take the Tube

YouTube is not the only video-sharing site out there. Go to www.teachertube.com to search for videos illustrating issues in your subject, from erupting volcanoes and grammar presentations to synchronised swimmers demonstrating cell-division. Once you've found something helpful you can embed the video into your blog. To do this, scroll down to the bottom right of the teachertube page where you will find lists of codes to copy into various different blog types. In this case I copied the Blogger code and pasted it into the HTML tab side of a post entry. Dadah! One click on the site now and you're away.

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