Mark Pentleton » languages

Heworth Grange CLC Podcasting Course Notes

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:36:15 +0000

Today I’ve been in Gateshead working with a group of MFL teachers on sourcing and creating podcasts in the MFL classroom. I covered various things in my workshops, and below you can find the links to the resources I’ve pointed out.

First of all, I run the Radio Lingua Network of language-learning podcasts, and our educational branch is called Radio Lingua Schools. On our Radio Lingua Schools website you can read about all the digital creativity workshops we run, working in the field of languages in primary and secondary schools up and down the country.

Introductory Discussion

I spoke about Twitter – sign up for your own Twitter account at http://twitter.com and you can then start following me – @markpentleton – and all the other MFL Twitterati I mentioned via Joe Dale’s MFL Twitterers group.

I also mentioned Wallwisher where you can “build a wall” and have your students post their homework as graffiti on the wall. You can read more about Simon Howell’s use of Wallwisher within MFL and there are more details of Helena Butterfield’s work here.

Another technology we had a brief look at was Voicethread which is a tool for talking about and sharing images, documents and videos. Jo Rhys-Jones has discussed various ways of using Voicethread in primary MFL here.

Fiona Joyce has created a wiki for MFL teachers using Storybird and Lisa Stevens has some examples on her site, including video versions of the Storybird stories she has created.

I suggested that using Google Maps, and specifically Street View is an excellent way of bringing the foreign culture into the classroom. It’s worth using http://maps.google.fr rather than the English language version, so that the interface is also in French. Google Maps and Street View are particularly useful for talking about the town, working with prepositions (eg. next to, opposite, etc.) and for practising giving directions. In addition, using “real” shops and services, street signs and even adverts and notices can bring added authenticity to a lesson.

Creating content

I showed examples of animations and film-making projects. Useful software links include:

The two podcast hosting services I mentioned were Podomatic and Libsyn.

For further information on making podcasts and using the apps mentioned, see these previous posts:

You may also be interested in our Creative Classroom series of tutorials and screencasts from CrunchEd Productions.

iPod Touch Project for Gateshead Schools

Peter has asked me to remind you that if you want to be part of the MFL iPod Touch project then please email him at p.haywood [at] hgclc.org.

Learning Zulu through song and GarageBand – ATI 2010

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:46:56 +0000

It’s a couple of weeks since I was in Cheltenham with enthusiastic teachers from up and down the country at the Apple Teacher Institute. As one of the ADEs I was leading workshops on podcasting and using iPod Touches (and iPads!) in the classroom, but one of my first duties at the conference was to do a keynote at 8:30 on the morning of the first full day of the conference. I had planned to do a session on my Mandarin Chinese Animation projects but having spent much of the journey down to Cheltenham listening to the Invictus soundtrack, full of wonderful South African rhythms and voices, I decided to do something different at the last minute.

I believe that GarageBand, part of the iLife suite of applications, is extremely useful in classrooms as a tool for providing rhythm to help learners repeat words, phrases, equations, formulae, etc. and I demonstrated this to the assembled delegates by teaching them some Zulu. Having visited South Africa for the first time last month I picked up a few phrases (which may find themselves included in a future podcast series…) in Zulu and I decided that I’d begin by teaching the word sanibonani, which is how you say “hello” to a group of people. I wanted to get in one of the lovely click sounds of Zulu, so I also taught the phrase ngisaqala ukufunda isiZulu – “I’m learning Zulu”.

The Voices and World Music jam packs for GarageBand provide some fantastic African sounds, so I prepared a backing track using some loops and a simple melody based on the two phrases. I then got everyone repeating the sounds, using the African rhythms as a background. We split up the audience, giving one half the tricky ngisaqala, the other half ukufunda, and then everyone said isiZulu together. Finally, I recorded them a couple of times chanting these phrases before putting everything together in GarageBand.

I only had 15 minutes for the entire Keynote, so I didn’t have time to put the final piece together there and then, but the idea was that the recording could then be shared among the learners, further consolidating their learning as they listened on their own iPods etc. To be honest I’d forgotten about the whole project as the rest of the ATI took over, but I remembered about the GarageBand file this morning so I’ve put together a performance using the backing track and the recordings made at ATI and you can have a listen here and let me know what you think!

Ngiyabonga (thanks) to everyone at ATI, and I hope you like it.

Language lessons for the Winter Olympics

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:52:42 +0000

I’ve just finished working on a series of podcasts for Gavinburn Primary in West Dunbartonshire. They’re doing some fantastic work with Games Based Learning and the p3 and p4 pupils are currently doing a major project on the Winter Olympics. The project is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary learning with the pupils looking at the Olympic games through many areas of the curriculum.

Gillian Penny – head teacher and fellow ADE – asked me to come into the school and do some work with the pupils and we identified together the kind of phrases they wanted to include in the course I would create for them. I then worked with some original recordings I had made for the One Minute Languages courses with Ann (Russian), Dag (Norwegian) and Yoshiko (Japanese) and created five lessons for each language. The full courses and lesson guides are now available over on the Radio Lingua Schools site. I hope they are useful to teachers and pupils in other schools too!