About me
I’m currently working as the co-ordinator of the Partners in Excellence project (PiE), for East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire and Argyll & Bute Councils in the west of Scotland. The aim of the project is to promote languages education among young people and to raise the profile of languages within the three participating authorities. More about the PiE project here.
I am also an Apple Distinguished Educator and work with Apple on a number of projects involving creative learning through film, animation, music and podcasting. I’ll be working at the forthcoming Apple Teacher Institute at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire after Easter and look forward to working with lots of inspiring teachers from across the country.
In my spare time I run Radio Lingua Ltd with my wife Catriona. Radio Lingua Ltd is a new media company providing language-learning by podcast. We currently offer courses in conversational German and Italian and our podcast Coffee Break Spanish is one of the world’s leading Spanish podcasts with in excess of 100,000 listeners per episode. More podcasts to come in the future!
It’s probably fairly obvious that languages play a large part in my life! I speak French, Spanish and Italian and am relatively confident in Norwegian, German, Portuguese and Catalan. I’ve recently been dabbling in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese too, but time doesn’t allow for much more than a dabble!
Dear Mark
i am a project manager working at Edexcel – specifically in Training from Edexcel department. I would appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about events we would like to organise for MFL teachers delivering our qualifications. Do you an email address i could use to send you further information or a phone number?
thanks
shakeh
Dear Mark,
I hate to bother you as you must be very busy but I’m currently working on an assignment for a Masters in Online and Distance Education with the Open University. I’m focusing on the use and effectiveness of RSS feeds and blogs in language learning and my tutor pointed me to your blog and the Radio Lingua Network as a prime example of language learning using Web 2 technologies. I’m looking for material and evidence of the usefulness of RSS feeds in language learning but have only recently qualified as a teacher and have limited data of my own on the experience of other learners in using RSS feeds and blogs. I would greatly appreciate any information or comments you might have given your actual use of the technology in a working environment.
Thanks for your time,
Malcolm