Has there ever been a TeachMeet which wasn’t worth attending? I don’t think so!
This particular event was organised on a Friday evening by @DeputyMitchell and @Dughall, and the room was packed out. Not only that, but there was a live video feed, and the event was being watched in Plymouth, Buckinghamshire, and in various other locations!
There were so many good ideas to take away, and the place was buzzing by the end. @simonhaughton has already done the hard work in covering the highlights in his post, and I did my slot on one of my favourite collaborative learning activities, which you can find information about in these previous posts, or by typing collaborative learning in the search box on this blog.
But what I wanted to do was quickly highlight some of the ideas and links that I could see having a use in language teaching. The majority are familiar to most, but by mentioning them here, at least I’ll know where to find them when I need them!
So, in no particular order:
Audioboo and ipadio for instant sound recordings and uploading to a blog.
Logo54 generates any words you like in the style of famous logos (like the one at the top of this post)
Those last couple of links were courtesy of @ideas_factory, who kindly shared a link to a whole host of generators here. Whilst browsing, I found this one:
onlinewahn.de is an image generator specifically in German, which may be of interest to some.
Huge thanks to the organisers, and it was great to meet and learn from such dedicated and talented practitioners.
Some people have been dropping hints lately that I should share a few more of my favourite co-operative learning strategies.
OK, OK I can take a hint!
Here’s one called Numbered Heads Together. To get the most out of it, you need to seat pupils in groups of 4 and of mixed ability. Each pupil will need a mini-whiteboard, and a pen that works 😉
Pupils numbers themselves 1-4 round their table, then teacher asks the question.
Using mini-whiteboards, pupils work individually at first to write down their best response.
When ready, each pupil gives a thumbs up, then all stand up. They huddle together, discuss and decide upon the group’s best answer, then sit down.
Teacher rolls a die, and which ever number it lands on (1-4), that person from each group must share their answer with the class.
Teacher can see errors, ask pupils to explain how they reached their conclusion, ask pupils to explain errors to other groups.
Some examples of how I use this activity:
Give the infinitive of an unknown regular verb and ask pupils to give a particular conjugation (ie getting them to apply the rule)
Give a sentence in the present tense and ask pupils to put it into the past/future tense
Give pupils all the words required to make a sentence, and ask them to unjumble it (very good for practising correct word order in German)
Give four or five words or phrases, ask which is the odd one out and why (could be gender, irregular verbs, phrases in different tenses)
Give four or five words in the target language (the dafter the better!) and ask pupils to create a grammatically correct sentence using all of the words (they can add other words, but must still use the words you supply) eg Jupiter, hatstand, monkey, George Bush.
Ask pupils to write rules for a particular grammar point they have learned (good for starter or plenary).
To help me with classroom organisation, I will often prepare the questions on PowerPoint first, but it’s not necessary to do this everytime.
Following on from other successful events, the North East became the latest region to host a meeting for MFL teachers to share good practice. Hosted at Cramlington Learning Village and organised by the most wonderful Chris Harte, the day brought together colleagues from up and down the country, who brought some examples of tricks and tips to enhance language teaching and learning.
I can’t begin to do full justice to all of the presentations here, but I’ll share the highlights, and where possible, link to people’s own blogs or presentations of their own work so that the information comes straight from the horse’s mouth.
First up was Mark Purves. Mark is an enthusiastic advocate of singing as a tool for learning, and he got the day off to a rousing start by sharing some strategies for just that. Music lifts the mood, and singing helps with controlling breathing – warm up exercises for voice,which is the instrument of languages.
Samantha Lunn was next, with some fabulous suggestions for routines in the language classroom – she explains it all – and posts links to relevant documents – on her blog, so head on over and see what she has to say!
Thinking skills were the feature of Lynn Smith’s presentation, and she shared with us a multitude of ideas for developing these in MFL teaching and learning:
Odd one out
Give a selection of words, use each word once only to make 8 phrases in past tense
Almost encouraging pupils to be confused, part of the learning and thinking process
Memory map – a house is described on page outside classroom – pupils must take it in turns to read description, return to group and draw what they have read
DeBonos hats to promote discussions
Plenary- create mind-map ( = synthesising)
Clare Seccombe (whose article was recently published in TES) spoke to us about reading books for use in language learning. Her presentation, including audio, can be found here, because she will explain it better than I ever could! Oh, and she blogs here!
Emma Bains talked about some changes which she is in the process of introducing to her department’s curriculum. They sound fabulous, and really imaginative. Here’s a taster:
Pupils become a SatNav when learning to describe their town
Cluedo-type activity to encourage pupils to repeat several phrases whilst trying to guess the correct response
Rights and responsibilities
I had been looking forward to meeting Simon McLoughlin, as I am a huge admirer of the work he has been doing with his primary pupils. He started by sharing a clip from Friends, to illustrate his point:
Simon uses Audioboo to record his pupils speaking, then lets them listen to themselves so that they can improve their pronunciation. It works a treat!
The University of Newcastle’s computer aided learning resources were shared by Thomas Snell, who showed us the link to a vast archive of language materials available at www.universed.co.uk.
Blockbusters was enthusiastically championed by Terri Dunne. She presented an interactive template and a variety of language structures which work with the game, including practising different tenses. Intensely competitive!
Dominic McGladdery shared some of his favourite classroom activities, which included:
Amanda Salt had flown over from Belfast just to attend this event, and she didn’t disappoint. Amanda related the details of her school’s annual Spanish immersion weekend for A level students. During this off-site weekend event, students take part in Dragon’s Den and treasure hunt style activities, and are not allowed to speak English in the presence of their teachers. Amanda’s school wiki has all of the details …
We were then challenged to alter the way we mark our pupils’ books by Alex Blagona. Alex was looking for ways to re-engage a group of demotivated year 8 pupils, so he began by asking them what they liked and didn’t like about their lessons. Alex then adapted his teaching to suit the responses, and at end of each of lesson, asked again for feedback from pupils in their exercise books. The marking process then became a dialogue between teacher and pupil, personalising the learning and assisting in developing conversations with parents too. Pupils enjoyed the fact that they felt free to comment and had ownership of learning.
Joe Dale extolled the virtues of the QR code in this presentation so wander on over to have a look. If you’re not sure what a QR code is, there’s an example below (you need a smart phone to read it), and there’s an explanation here.
We then has a very special guest appearance, live from Oldham via Skype – Isabelle Jones told us about some cross curricular work she had done with music and art, resulting in some amazing rap music produced in French by some of her most demotivated boys. We were all well and truly bowled over. and it was lovely to see Isabelle with us virtually!
Rene Koglbauer has done some lovely work with social media to improve writing, particularly that of boys. Initially it was a dialogue for marking through email, and expanded to using Facebook in German for writing film reviews. Pupils and staff commented on posts, and despite initial concerns over safeguarding, it turned into a very successful venture.
Class Dojo – real-time behaviour rewards in class – increases engagement
Triptico – suite of IWB tools, eg Word Magnets for grouping, class timer, scoreboards, ordering priority of sentences
Lingro – turns a webpage into a clickable dictionary resource
During the day, there were also several ‘genius bar’ sessions, where people sat as experts during coffee break on a variety of topics. As I was hosting one myself I don’t know what went on, but given the calibre of the other speakers I have no doubt they were worth the effort.
If you’d like to see the notes from my own genius bar, you could use the QR code above to take a look (see what I did there!), or check out this post.
Last Saturday (24th September) I took part in the MFLSAT event held at Cramlington Learning Village, where my contribution was to share some thoughts on co-operative learning structures at my ‘genius bar’ (my host’s description, not mine!). Watch out for a longer post soon about other speakers’ contributions.
I have talked about collaborative learning structures before (here and here), but I make no apologies because these techniques were the thing that turned my teaching around and gave me the confidence to hand the learning over to the pupils.
So here are the few slides I prepared as an overview, and below is the handout explaining some of the activities in a little more detail. Please help yourself!
… Stop Press … Samantha Lunn is also working with these structures now, so you may want to wander over to her blog to see what she’s up to – she’s just blogged this, for example …
I was delighted to be invited to speak to teachers from Catholic schools in Manchester today. It was nice to catch up with a few colleagues whom I hadn’t seem for a while, and it was also a pleasure to work with such a receptive and enthusiastic group of teachers. I was asked to share some collaborative learning strategies, which seemed to go down well – at least, I had some lovely comments which indicated this was the case, so a good start to my half-term!
Here are the slides from the presentation.
The linked files or templates are here, if you find them useful.
Feel free to use / adapt the materials here. If you use any of the activities, please do let me know, or if you need help understanding how the PowerPoints have been constructed, do get in touch.
Lingua Franca 