#ililc3

 It seems like a really long time since #ililc3 and I'm embarrassed to have taken so long to blog about it, but there have been good reasons. I spent the whole of the week after the event making Tarsia puzzles, dice games and Triptico files and then spent the whole of half term moving blogs over from Posterous and keeping three teenagers fed and occupied, as my French friend's son came over for the week to brush up his English.

Everyone else has already blogged about #ililc3 so rather than repeat what they said, this is a little bit about how it has influenced me in the classroom.

1. Clare Seccombe, Tarsia
I love Tarsia puzzles and had used them before but couldn't figure out how to input the text so that the words were separated out or in different fonts. In her session, Clare showed us how to change the input settings and gave us a massive hexagon puzzle to work out. It really inspired me and I have used Tarsia with all my language classes since. Not only does it help students revise vocabulary, it also shows me which vocab I need to go through again with them and I've found discussion with students once they've completed the puzzle to be very productive for both them and me.

2. Dominic McGladdery, from squawk to talk
Dominc showed us a range of great websites and activities to get students talking and bridge the gap between GCSE and AS. I really liked news in slow French and have used this in my AS class since. The thing I liked most was the dice games to get students talking - see Dom's blog for examples. I've made dice games for most of my classes now and when I tried this with my adult class they said it was the most French they'd ever spoken. Great result.

3. Amanda Salt, using Triptico in the classroom
I'd gone as far as getting Triptico installed on the desktop in my classroom, but hadn't actually used it before #ililc3. Amanda's session was fabulous. She showed us a whole range of brilliant Triptico games. The first thing I did when I got home after the weekend was to upgrade to Triptico plus - for a £15 annual subscription this lets you save games and use them across and pcs where Triptico is installed - well worth it, in my opinion. I've been using it since and had a great lesson using Guess the Question with an NVQ French class yesterday - it was based on train dialogues and they only had the answers from a dialogue. We also used Order Sorter to put a dialogue in order - all great practice for their next assessment.

The other sessions I attended were all fabulous as well, as were they keynote talks and the show and tell. The CPD at #ililc3 was outstanding but it meant far more to me than that. I spend most evenings on Twitter sharing ideas with many of the people who were at #ililc3 and to all be together under one roof was an amazing experience, whether to meet up with friends from last time, meet Twitter friends in real life for the first time or get to know newcomers. Sharing friendship and great ideas are what the #mfltwitterati are all about. See you at #ililc4.

Flipping the Classroom

In my final update from this term, I wanted to share how I've been trying to flip my classroom. Students can get behind with their work very quickly if they miss lessons for any reason, so I decided to create an integrated approach to ICT, leaving them no reason to miss out on learning. This is how it works.

1. I have told students to check our VLE every time we have a lesson, whether they are in college or not (we use Moodle). The AS and A2 French pages are divided into topic areas and every time I create worksheets or presentations, I upload them.

2. Edmodo - every week I post their essay titles here and give them the option to submit their work via Edmodo. I also create all my lesson plans in Evernote and share them on Edmodo so students can access them even if they are not in college. Their weekly vocabulary test is now done on Edmodo as well - this eliminates the need for scrappy bits of paper which get lost, allows them to track their progress and enables them to complete the test at any time during the week (under my supervision of course).

3. I created a wiki for students to use as a library for grammar and links to websites to support what we have done in class and enable them to carry out independent reading. I've started experimenting with Explain Everything and Showme to create voice-over so that students can access my explanations from outside college.

 4. I set up a blog on Posterous for students to share some of their work. It's still in its infancy but we have had fun with it so far, particularly with Sock Puppets, which they like because it makes them anonymous by changing their voices.

5. I started using Socrative in most lessons. Socrative is a website which allows you as a teacher to set quizzes, tests and questions for your students to answer online. I've been using it to generate an exit ticket at the end of the lesson - students have to say how well they understood the lesson and answer a question from the board - this is a quick and easy way to use AfL to inform planning for the next lesson.

My next job is to evaluate whether this approach has been helpful to students. I'm in the process of devising a survey, helped once again by the wonderful #mfltwitterati.

Many thanks to @syded06 who has given me lots of advice on flipping my classroom and @HeikeBruton, who has given me advice about the survey.

Talking Posters

Early on this term, I decided to make an interactive wall display for our open evening, inspired by Kelda Richards' Talking Wall. The idea is to use augmented reality to embed a video clip into an image - in this case, the video is of students talking about the environment in French. I asked Kelda a lot of questions on Twitter and she gave me some really helpful answers and I also followed the instructions on her blog, which are crystal clear.

The main challenge I faced was that the students weren't willing for me to video them, which is fair enough but not exactly conducive to a video project. In the end we compromised - I pointed the camera at a picture on the whiteboard so the recording only picked up their voices and the picture.

You need the Aurasma app in order to produce the talking posters. Once you have uploaded your video clip, all you need to do is open Aurasma on your device and hover it over your chosen image - this will open up the video on your device. You need to start off by making the video - make sure it is no longer than 30 seconds or it won't work on the app. I used my iPhone for this. Then print out the image you want to use and take a photograph of it using Aurasma - the picture has to be very clear otherwise it won't work properly. Then you need to upload your video to connect with the image on Aurasma - I emailed it to myself on my iPhone to generate the link. Then create a QR code of the image - this will allow other viewers to upload the clip to their device so they can play it. It's easy enough to create a QR code; I used qrcode.kaywa.com. The viewer points their device at the QR code on the poster, which loads the image onto Aurasma (telling the viewer to download the app if they don't already have it). Then the viewer holds their device over the image and Aurasma opens up the video on the device.
The finished poster looks like this with a QR code attached - I haven't included the QR code here, so as to protect the students' privacy.

Afterwards I used Showme to talk through how the display works and Joe Dale kindly made this QR code of it - have a look.

SOLO Thinking

Our focus at work for this academic year is on active learning so, with this in mind, I decided to use SOLO taxonomy with my AS French group. (For anyone who's confused already, SOLO stands for Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes and it describes levels of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject). Unsure how to begin, I turned, as always, to the #mfltwitterati and sure enough, both John Connor and Chris Harte came up with some interesting reading within minutes. John has a video, "SOLO Taxonomy explained using Lego bricks", on his blog and it gives a clear explanation of the thinking processes involved. Christ Harte uses hexagons in SOLO taxonomy and he talks on his blog about empowering learners to move from one stage to the next. To gain some further insight, I also read Sharing Pedagogical Purposes and Tait Coles' blog, both of which helped me to understand how SOLO taxonomy enables students to take control of their learning.

I decided to devise a revision activity on the topic of Le Cinéma, using a set of topic-related vocabulary on hexagons. The words included nouns, verb infinitives, conjugated verbs and conjunctions. The students would have to discuss the links between the words, whether in terms of meaning or grammatical function. As the words were printed on hexagons, it opened up the possibility to link the words in a variety of different directions. Rather than transfer meaning, the students would have to create their own meanings by thinking about the vocabulary and reflecting on the different ways the words could be used.

At the outset of the activity my students were a bit dubious; they had not been challenged to think about vocabulary in this way before. I explained to them that the purpose of the activity was for them to find links between the words and explain why - they would be coming up with their own answers and my role was to listen to their discussion and think about the links they produced, rather than to judge their work against a given set of answers. I had no preconceptions about what they would produce. It was very interesting to listen to the conversations which then took place, as the students began to discuss not what the vocabulary meant but how the different words could be used, not just in terms of making sentences but also in terms of synonyms and words which related to different aspects of  the topic.

One thing I noticed, however, was that the groups were too big - the students were in groups of four and this did not give everybody the opportunity to contribute to discussion. Next time I use SOLO taxonomy, I will try smaller groups with the aim of encouraging each student to take an active part in discussion.

Here is an example of what they produced.

Language Show

I took this little presentation to the Show and Tell at the Language Show yesterday to talk about my week in Malaga on an immersion course for Spanish teachers, run by lfee.net and fully funded by Comenius.
I can't recommend it highly enough - not just for the amount of Spanish I learnt or for the brilliant teaching ideas we were given, but also for the experience of living in Malaga for a week and making new friends and contacts. Yesterday I met up with one of the other teachers who went on the course and we are planning to all get together next year and run our own CPD day. It was so good that I'm already planning my next trip. If anyone reads this presentation and wants any more information, please feel free to contact me via Twitter.

Gremlins - ICT in MFL for newbies

Here is my presentation from today's Hampshire Language conference. It's another presentation of ICT tools for MFL teachers who aren't very confident and don't know where to get started.

Gremlins - getting started with ICT in MFL from Annalise Adam

Hampshire Conference

It's not too late to book your place at the Hampshire Conference at the University of Southampton this Friday, 28th September. There is a great line-up of CPD. To book your place, go to
www.languagessoutheast.org.uk