Modern Language in the Primary School Conference

Today I was leading a day-long set of workshops in Dingwall, in the northern Highlands. Here is a rundown of a particularly difficult task with a wide range of expertise, teaching style, background, school type, with schools ranging from 5 to 500 students, in cities and extremely rural areas. I've created separate pages on each of the areas covered which will provide the basis of new material on the MFLE.

Hopefully participants will become members of the MFLE forums to get continued support with their ICT use in the teaching of French in the primary school.

Activities today included:

1. Eight grounding principles for the day's work, available (more or less) in the podcast done at Language World 2006.
2. A podcasting workshop where participants
   • chose a plan of action;
   • wrote a script;
   • recorded their audio using Audacity;
   • add music from a variety of free sound sites (see 2b);
   • converted the Audacity file to an MP3 using this LAME encoder;
   • published their audio to this HighlandPodcast blog, using Typepad.com. (They could have used an edublogs.org blog for free, along with the PodPress plugin).
   • Look at how you might do this in class by taking a look at the Oldbury Wells students in action, who were podcasting at the same time in England.
3. A look at the power of audience when student work is published.
4. An introduction to how hyperlinks can be used to create collaborative real-life links between schools, students and schools. Technorati was the tool used to find like-minded schools, although ScotEduBlogs would have been a good place to go, too, to find Scottish colleagues.
   Richard in East Lothian has just today suggested a collaborative story-writing project using some online tools such as blogs and wikis. What a great offer to get a new blogger off to a start.
5. A look at how images can be annotated in Flickr (and we did an example using the Vikings for inspiration). David Muir has just posted his advice on using Flickr notes.
6. A look at how Flickr images can be tagged with a longitude and latitude (in one click with Flickr Geotagr), linked to GoogleEarth by geographically tagging an image correctly
   (e.g.: geo:lat=56.142225
   geo:lon=-3.919845)
   
   and adding this code to the description of the picture or photo:
   <a href="http://www.roblog.com/flickrfly.kml">Fly to this location</a>
(Requires <a href="http://earth.google.com">Google Earth</a>)

It was a pretty mega day, but I hope that the Primary teachers take just one idea in the next year and make use of it to make modern languages exciting and relevant to their 21st Century learners.

Comments

[Douglas Latto]

Hi Ewan,
Doug from the secondry school podcasting group here.
What site is it you download the podcasting program from?

[Ewan McIntosh]

Audacity - your podcast is top of the blog at edu.blogs.com and the link is in there.

[Susan Marsh]

Hi I am just starting out with podcasts - have ordered Garageband 3 but cannot use this in school - would i be able to use it for mixing etc at home once pupils have recorded stuff. How do I get hold of free book you have produced? Sounds great

Thanks a lot

[Frank]

is this for learning a modern foreign language..some other useful tools are Electronic Pocket Dictionaries especially if they can talk back to you (i.e. .interactive ). yes there are many choices to learn from..