Hampshire MFL NQT Training Day Presentation, Nov 4th, 2014

See below for an updated version of my presentation on New Technologies for the Hampshire MFL NQTs, from November 4th, 2014. Feel free to download and share.

Using VOKI in lesson... without a computer!

This week I was observed in my new school for the first time. I wanted to use some new technology in the lesson, despite the lack of iPads available in the department, as it has always been the thing that people ask me most questions about with my teaching, particularly since I made the switch from a very Apple centred school to where I am now. The problem, however, was thinking of a way to incorporate the technology into the lesson without actually having devices for each of the pupils to use.

With my year 9 mixed ability German class (pre-option group as KS3 is years 7, 8 & 9 here), we have just begun the topic of School. Having revised school subjects and basic opinions in the previous lesson, this lesson was focussing on use of varied adjectives to justify opinions and to revisit comparison structures. At the beginning of the lesson, pupils matched some new adjectives and practised these before going over the formation of a comparison structure.

I decided I wanted to do a listening activity to enable the pupils to do some self assessment (and hopefully show to my observers that progress had been made in the lesson: tick!) so I quickly created a VOKI, incorporating the structures from the lesson that we wanted to practise, so comparisons and complex 'weil' clauses. You can see the VOKI avatar here:

We completed a simple listening comprehension worksheet where the pupils had to select the correct option from three given choices for 8 questions. Once we had been through this and marked it, it was time for the pupils to move on to producing a text of their own. I gave the pupils a transcript of the listening and we came up with a checklist for their own text - things they wanted to include to make theirs better than mine. Now it was time for the tech without the tech bit!

I gave pupils mini whiteboards and a 1 minute timer. They had to draw an avatar on their whiteboard before the time ran out. Once the time was up, I played the theme tune to countdown, whilst they played 'pass the parcel' with their mini whiteboards. As soon as the music had ended, whichever whiteboard they had ended up with became their avatar. Pupils then listened to one another's texts in pairs whilst holding their avatar up in front of their faces. This was just for fun but also within this mixed ability group I think it served a real purpose - we took the emphasis away from the awkwardness of speaking a foreign language in front of our peers and moved it towards enjoying the moment of being silly. Every pupil in the room spoke their text out loud and I'm convinced that we had longer responses from some pupils than perhaps I had had before. I really enjoyed the lesson and it seemed that the pupils were motivated and engaged too - fingers crossed my company enjoyed it as much as we did!

QR Code Speaking Homework

I just wanted to share a quick post as a few people had asked on Twitter about the speaking homework I set my year 9s. We are building up to the BA Language Flag Award (information can be found here)and the majority of the test is graded on their spoken language. With a class of 28 I can't give them the individual attention they deserve on 5 hours a fortnight (well maybe I can, but I don't feel like it is ever enough when it comes to individual feedback on pronunciation, intonation and fluency, which the test is marked on) so I set them a little task. 

Part one of the test requires a general conversation element - we had a discussion in class as to what they thought might be useful to know in order to be able to cope with this part of the test and brainstormed some vocabulary. I didn't guide them too much - one because the guidelines state you can't but also I wanted them to produce something really personal. They created a draft and then for homework went away and recorded it using Vocaroo.com. I absolutely love this website as it is so user friendly and despite being basic, has some great functionality. The students recorded themselves reciting their draft on the site and when it came to save, hit the QR Code button and it produced a code that they printed and stuck in their books. I took these in and listened to each student individually, marking and giving pointers on their fluency, pronunciation and intonation and pointing out key phonic mistakes. 

Whilst I marked their drafts for glaringly obvious errors, I didn't correct every single one as I was keen to keep this a speaking activity. I didn't want to put them off producing something that wasn't near perfect as I think the main problem for their year group is the fear of speaking aloud in the target language. I made sure to acknowledge this and leave a positive comment referring to the audio clip too so that it wasn't just a series of things to do better. 

I have just taken the books back in, having asked students to reflect on if they liked the task or not and why and it made for really interesting reading - most could see the value in the task but many commented on how awkward it felt. I'm hoping to continue to amp up the speaking practise in lessons so eventually we lose that awkwardness and develop into confident speakers of Spanish.

The first ever TeachMeetWave!

Thursday evening saw the very first TM or TeachMeet at Wildern School in Hedge End. Kate Broadribb and I organised it, nicknamed after the lecture theatre on site, and were excited but a little unsure what to expect. We were blown away by the number of people that took time out of their Thursday evening (and for Wildern teachers, that was after a staff meeting too) to get some free CPD and have a chat with colleagues from other schools. We welcomed 20+ colleagues from near and far and heard a combination of nano and micro presentations (3 and 7 minutes long, don't ask me to remember which is which). The event kicked off at 5pm in the LRC and luckily we finished right on time at 6:30, our handy stopwatch beeping to warn those that dared go over their time limit! We used the hashtag #tmwave to collect tweets about the evening and will hopefully be using it next time round too. 

Find below a summary of the presentations.

Ben Bishop - Green Pen (pre)Marking 

Students self assess their work in green pen, before submitting it. They then reflect in the usual way after teacher has marked.

Penny Langford - Talking like a book

Encouraging writers to talk aloud when forming sentences, rehearsing orally what they want to get down on paper.

Georgina Sculthorpe - Number Day

NSPCC Number Day hit Wildern this week - Georgina told us all about the numeracy starters, the number cake sale and the number hunt which raised over £200 for NSPCC.

Joseph Birch - Socrative (www.socrative.com)

Socrative is an online quiz website Joe uses with handheld devices in class to test pupils. You can also download results to see common errors.

Selina Plowman - Creative Design Ideas

Selina introduced us to how she encourages students to step away from 'drawing' in the design process and how she combines these techniques with snack learning.

Ali Gregory - What's the question in the room?

Ali's idea for a starter puts the students in control of guessing what the topic is using just a key word on the board. A student must hide outside first, whilst the class provide answers to any questions he asks when he comes in, but tailoring their answer so that the student can guess the keyword. Perhaps you have to see it in action for it to make sense from my explanation!

Javi Rodriguez - Flipping the MFL classroom

Javi and I introduced our new blog and explained our experiences so far with 'flipping' in MFL.

Helen Winter - PEEL (Point, Evidence, Explain, Link) paperchains

Pupils write a response in the usual PEE way, but using paperchains to write out their answers and linking them up for a visual way of developing answers.

Sophie Bullivant - Progress using Post-Its

Objectives are divided into colours - students work through colour by colour, encouraging them to aim for higher order responses. Post-Its become visual marker of progress made in their books.

Me - Kahoot (www.getkahoot.com)
See my blog post here for more info. 

Pam Rymill - Blogging (www.pamelarymill.co.uk)

Pam talked about how ICT are using blogging with teachers and students and introduced us to her site as a taster.

Lauren Vary - Doughnut Thinking Circle
Lauren's doughnut design was a clear way to show students how to link together and develop writing, by breaking it down in to manageable chunks. It was also good fun as Joe showed us by leaping up to help model an example!

Corinna Payne - Source Talk
Using sources in history but encouraging better engagement with the material through structured questioning. Source can be printed in middle of page with questions around it, pupils work their way through.

Iggy Rhodes - What is the Whole Education Network?
Iggy introduced us to what the Whole Education Network is about and how we as teachers can engage with some of its ongoing project work.

Thank you for attending and making it such an enjoyable and successful evening. And thank you for the kind comments!

Flip Lesson 2 - planning!

So we have one lesson down in our Flipped Learning experiment! Not ones to slack off, we have set about planning lesson two for early next week. The main reflections from planning the first lesson were that although the flipped model enabled us to effectively differentiate for mixed abilities within our groups, we perhaps took this a step too far and created too many activities for pupils who were too similar in ability. We are fortunate that in this particular population, the pupils are set in to four classes. We had aimed for four mini groups within each class of our flipped lesson -  on reflection, this time we will go for three.

This is because, as expected, pupils require varying amounts of time in which to complete activities, ending up at slightly different points depending on how long it takes them to complete a reading, writing or speaking task. Having many activities to then get them through and have to micro manage only creates more confusion and in actual fact more work on the teacher's part. The concept of flipped learning is that the teacher should, through careful planning and structuring of the lesson, become a facilitator to the learning (or hopefully practising) taking place and therefore pinpoint their attention more accurately to those who need it. A lesson should effectively run itself, or at least that is how we envisage it in our planning stages. This is probably the part that as a languages teacher I will find more difficult to get to grips with and I suspect some of our students will feel this way too. They are so used to us being the expert, the source of knowledge in the class, that to have to rely on their own brains and the information available to them from a previous task will require a shift in attitude. I'm hoping this will build independence and, here's that Ofsted word again, resilience. 

So this time through we are planing three groups - Purples, Ambers and Greens. The context of the lesson is future tense with year 8 Spanish on the topic of La Comida.Using the Explain Everything app for the iPad (that took a while to get to grips with, I'll be honest - this 'flipping' is nothing if not a steep learning curve!), we created a video demonstrating using the future tense. We introduced time phrases to stretch our most able and their preparation task was to complete a Google doc matching the translation of time phrases Spanish to English and then manipulate the language independently to create some future tense sentences of their own. We will then use the lesson itself to build confidence in using the future tense through reading and speaking activities. 

As before, purples will be those who didn't complete the homework task and will start by watching the video on iPads. Ambers completed their homework but perhaps not grasping everything without some additional support and greens were those who from the Google task were most able to use what they have learned with some success. The tasks this time will be a card sort activity, putting a sentence into the correct order (we have prepared 3 to varying degrees of difficulty), a reading activity consisting comprehension questions and a verb finding task and finally some speaking practise. We are hoping to encourage those more able pupils to offer support to their peers in listening to pronunciation or peer assessing reading. Watch this space!

The first flipped lesson in MFL - Reflections

As part of our ongoing work with New Technologies for our School Improvement Group, members of our MFL dept at Wildern are experimenting with flipped learning. If you aren't entirely sure what Flipped Learning or FlippingYour Classroom is, see this video here or follow the #flippedclass #flippedlearning hashtags on Twitter. You may have seen me blog some time ago about wanting to start the flipped classroom this year - I had big plans as the Summer months left me with ambitions for the new school year, some of which I have been able to get my teeth into, others not so much!

Unfortunately I don't have a year 7 class on my timetable this year so it wasn't an option to embed the 'flipping' from the outset as I had first intended. Actually what I hadn't anticipated was quite how long it would take me to decide just who we would flip the learning with. I worked with Rhiannon and Javi in my department as we decided not to duplicate (or even triplicate, is that a word?) workload and we set about going back and forth deciding whether to flip with year 8, 9 or 10. Year 10 was ruled out due to the restrictive nature of Controlled Assessment - it just wasn't feasible to experiment at such an early stage in the term when pupils were due to start their first speaking task and it didn't seem fair to throw their learning up in to the air without knowing how it would pan out and risk losing their engagement as such a crucial time. Our year 9 scheme of work is quite unique with art modules, beauty modules and British Airways Language Flag Award assessment at the end of the year. Some of the units we are teaching are new to us this year, so again we thought it best to settle with the material first rather than start mixing up two things in one. That left us with year 8 - fortunately we all had a year 8 class studying Spanish and with different abilities so it would just be a case of differentiating our materials for our individual classes. 

We are currently studying a unit of work loosely based on Listos 1 Module of La Comida (food). We have so far covered basic food vocabulary as well as giving opinions so we decided to schedule in our flipped lesson in the context of buying fruit and vegetables at the greengrocers. We created our own video using a FlipCam, where we presented vocabulary and then demonstrated a mini role play taking place between customers and the greengrocer. This video can be seen here. It was quite simple to edit the video using iMovie on Mac so that we could add subtitles. We chose not to subtitle all of the speech - just the key vocab or key phrases we wanted to teach. The video was embedded in to a page on our school VLE (virtual learning environment) where students usually collect their homework from. In order to ensure pupils had actually watched the video and to help us set groups for the flipped lesson, we asked students to complete a Google doc. We also managed to embed this on the page too so that pupils could scroll down and complete the answers in the Google form immediately below the video they had watched and thus ensuring they didn't need to remember lots of links (and therefore forget them, meaning they weren't prepared for the lesson!).

When it came to the lesson itself, we had the results from the Google form to support group setting. We divided pupils into four groups - Purple if they hadn't completed the homework, then Red, Amber or Green depending on how well they appeared to have understood the material from the video. The activities they completed were as per this lesson plan:

As a three, we reflected on the lesson immediately after. Rhiannon had a dual language accelerated set and the initial feedback was that her class really were on board with the lesson and went with it, feeding back that they enjoyed the task and as a teacher Rhiannon commented that it ran very smoothly. She had no Red group - the pupils in her class coped well with the stimulus video material so perhaps next time we will think about whether to subtitle or not, or perhaps run two versions of the video. My class were the set below - mid to high ability pupils - and seemed to engage well with the task. There was no doubt that seeing their teachers on film was enjoyable and motivating as a homework task. I felt like my class required a little more micro-managing; pupils were on different tasks at different times as we had anticipated but to keep this working either needed more intervention from me or perhaps none at all. Javi felt the same from his class and with his lower ability set they didn't get on to the final written aspect of the task. We are hoping that as pupils become more familiar with the concept they will start to develop independence which will see them through the running of the lesson and ensure as teachers we can be used as facilitators to the learning taking place. I did notice there was far less off task behaviour or opportunities for it to take place - there was no point in playing the class clown or trying to distract other people as they were all doing something completely different anyway.

We are now setting about introducing a second flipped learning lesson next week, looking at using the future tense to say what you are going to eat and drink. We welcome any comments or questions!

Bringing languages to *real* life

As a department, we much prefer to create our own listening and reading materials for classes instead of using textbooks, unless something really fits a particular topic well or exploits a certain point. With my year 10 this week, covering what is perhaps usually a quite mundane topic, I tried to engage them with images and photographs instead and tailor my activities to suit. 

Reading - We are on the GCSE context of relationships and we needed to revise family and physical description, so I wrote a short description of both of my parents and showed them photos. The pupils then had some time to read the texts from the board and try to remember as much as possible. I gave them a memory test whereby they had to tell me how much they could remember about my parents from the written descriptions. I was quite honest and matched the pictures to my description for my mixed ability class - if you were testing a high ability class this would be a good way for them to prove their reading skills! It was a really nice activity for them to practise their reading as they actually cared about the answers instead of reading from a textbook about fictitious characters and they wanted to get to know me and find out more about my family. It was a also a lovely way to build positive relationships with what has been at time a tricky group to get to know. 

Speaking - We then went on to discuss what makes a good friend. After brainstorming some qualities of a good or indeed a bad friend, we did a bit of group talk about some famous people and whether they would make a good best friend. I picked people which would generate some discussion and argument for the tables - Chris Brown, Nicole Scherzinger, the Queen, Jeremy Clarkson - before summarising some key vocab that came out of our discussions as a class. It was then time to practise some listening.

Listening - I chose to use a Voki character (www.voki.com) instead of reading aloud to my class. It provides a visual animation to your voice recording, or if you don't have access to a mic on your laptop, it has a handy function where you can convert text to speech in a number of different accents. I recorded a short piece (the limit is 60s) describing my friends with a random little pink bunny rabbit character. They then had to decide which friend was which from a photo I gave them and answer some simple listening comprehension questions. Again, this was a nice way for them to find out a little bit more about me, whilst using vocabulary from the topic in a real context. I could also adapt the text to include certain structures that I wanted to exploit before setting them up with a transcript to have a go at writing their own text about their own best friends.

La música española

Really enjoy using music in lessons, particularly in the target language, but more often than not I enjoy it more than the pupils. I have recently discovered an artist on youtube, Kevin, Karla y la banda, who rerecord pop songs in Spanish. These are brilliant for Kagan activities - I frequently reinforce question and answers in the TL by getting pupils to prepare a response (or if they are higher ability, improvise their answers instead) and dance around the room to music. When the music stops, they must ask the person nearest to them to answer their question. I am known to shout "Now tell a fib!" to get pupils used to using more vocabulary rather than just their set response to a given question.

This is a current favourite - everyone loves a bit of Rhi-Rhi...

 We Found Love - Kevin, Karla y la banda en español