The iPad has arrived!!!!

Oh my goodness how giddy am I?! I have finally got my hands in my lovely shiny new toy, and it is sooooo much fun (apologies now for the inevitable overuse of exclamation marks etc in this post).

I have had a lovely evening/morning playing with apps, and for now, I am just going to share a couple of successes/frustrations...

I have just made my first ever screencast... I proudly present today's 'mini grammar point of the day' (my AS class have one at the start of each lesson) THIS: http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/how-to-say-this-in-french/5710937/?s=tQdtOm&ref=app

Just a little bit proud of myself ;)

It was super easy to do... I have always wanted to be able to do these but it seemed such a complicated process on a PC. I used Educreations mainly because it's free, I thought I'd give it a go before getting Explain Everything which I have seen lots of people recommend. I thought it was very straightforward for a newbie, just what I wanted, so will keep exploring that until I find things I cannot do with it. I am a bit averse to actually spending money on apps!

I've also downloaded Evernote on recommendation, but not really sure what I'm meant to do with it yet... Need time to play with that one I think.

Also thus far I haven't been able to fully use my school VLE... I can open some bits but not access resources. It may just be that I can't on iPad but I won't give up yet!!!

So much fun to be had... Now just need my cable to arrive so I can link this baby to my projector!

Triptico scorers... Manna from heaven for the mathematically challenged!

Ok, so as my students will readily attest, I am no mathematician! And yet I love playing team games in the classroom. And much as I try to protest, when I inevitably mess up the scoring, that it's 'only a game' or 'one mark doesn't make that much difference', to year 8, of course it does! And actually, competitive soul that I am, I would care too!

So you will imagine the peace that reigned today when Triptico was brought in to solve the problem. 45 mins of a fab little game involving 6 teams and a mini-whiteboard each, and not a complaint to be heard about my maths! Hooray!!!

checkthis.com for setting homework

I thought of another use for checkthis.com today on the spur of the moment. I get so frustrated with kids writing 'do sheet' or 'learn words' etc. in their planners despite what I ask them to put, and then having no idea what their homework is when they get home!

So my new idea is for them to write the weblink down to a checkthis.com poster, which has all the instructions and support on it. Obviously there are issues of accessibility but this particular class have 2 weeks until their next lesson (silly timetable!) so they have plenty of time to use school PCs at lunch etc.

It didn't take any longer to create the poster than it would have taken to write on the board, and I know that they will all know what to do!

A note on checkthis - I don't sign in when creating posters for kids as it if you do, it connects to your FB/Twitter and I obviously don't want them seeing that. You could I imagine create a twitter/FB profile specifically for this purpose. You can create without logging in, as a 'guest', but then you can't save/edit later. Swings and roundabouts I guess!

http://checkthis.com/hlks

Observations

Like most teachers I would imagine, I get in a real flap when I know I'm being observed. I think it is because so much is riding on such a small part of your practice. Anyone can have an off lesson as we all know, even the best of teachers, plus there are bits of lessons that just have to happen sometimes, that can't be made 'whizzy', that don't demonstrate 'rapid and sustained progress', that are teacher dominated etc. I am not saying that this is ok all the time, but we can all think of examples! I was having an interesting chat with a colleague today and we decided that in some ways it would be better to be observed all the time, like you are as an NQT, as at least then the overall picture would be properly reflective. Rest assured I won't be suggesting that to SLT however!

This week at work is the MFL departmental review, where SLT drop in on and observe 2 lessons over the week per teacher, and also look at books/marking/assessment, progress trends, SoW etc. All a bit stressful! I was really chuffed today as my AS lesson was given an outstanding grade, in no small part thanks to all the ideas I have picked up from twitter / people's blogs / ililc3 over the last few months.

The Prezi for the lesson is here, and I will upload it and the other texts used to the MFL twitterati dropbox asap. Things that went down really well with the people observing were the focus on skills rather than content (in this case independent listening skills, as introduced by Isabelle Jones' fab 'escalator failure' clip, the links between the tasks (sounds focus in starter leading to listening gap fill etc), differentiation afforded by the Tarsia puzzle among other things, the group work 'donut task' for the reading on bacs and the students' reflection on the strategies used in an attempt to bring a bit of metacognition into the equation! They also liked the plenary puzzle for which I used Triptico flip selector to present a random series of questions checking their understanding of the content of the lesson, and the activity reflecting on progress towards objectives. Finally the feedback forms I have designed for essays and speaking cards were highlighted, I will add these to the dropbox too in case anyone is interested. They are WJEC specific but could be very easily adapted.

THANK YOU to everyone on twitter who shares things... I am feeling really inspired about work at the moment, and although this week (and half term) have been completely manic and exhausting, it is always a good feeling when your hard work pays off! Now roll on Friday and LARGE glass of wine!!!!

First steps with QR codes and Prezi

So, it is finally half term, and that means I
a) have some time to process the wonder that was ililc, and
b) start putting some of the ideas into practice

Prezi v PowerPoint
Yesterday I made my first Prezi, based on the French school system for y12. It took me the whole morning but there was a fair bit of faffing about on Google looking for resources to include as well. Prezi was more straightforward than I though it would be. I managed to insert my original ppt presentation fairly painlessly, although I couldn't get it to occupy the frames in the template. I suspect there is a way, I just haven't found it yet!

Inserting a sound file was a bit of an issue at first as you can't embed MP3 files, but after converting it to MP4 it was ok, and I like the fact that I can play the sound file and have the questions displayed at the same time easily. After lots of googling for FAQs, I managed to do pretty much everything I wanted to and was quite chuffed with the end result: http://bit.lyYtms1T

Now, the question is, will I continue to use Prezi as my main tool for creating slide shows? Probably not in the short term as I think I need to keep practising and get a bit more fluent. It's not realistic to spend that much time preparing every lesson. I will keep going though on the days where I have less prep. Also, it won't be as easy to share with my lovely dept as I am not sure how readily they would all take to Prezi. However, I do think it looks really cool and will impress the kids, but I am always a little wary of the 'show' overtaking the 'content' of the lesson... sometimes it would be easier just to scribble it on the board - the end result in terms of learning would be the same. Also, I know myself, give me a tool like this and I will spend HOURS making it into a thing of beauty, aligning everything straight, designing colour schemes etc etc... I am bad enough on PowerPoint! Watch this space.

QR codes
My second achievement of halt term so far was to put some QR codes into action. Baby steps and all that! So, I have revamped by 'whizzy word wall' - my all time face classroom display - and added a QR code for each section which leads to a poster created with www.checkthis.com, (e.g. http://t.co/6Flkokg5) to explain how to use the words in a sentence. I then used QR stuff to create a QR code from the link.

And the finished article:

I will be encouraging kids to use it in lessons next week, so fingers crossed!

Triptico word spinner

I used triptico for the first time today. Wow! If you haven't already, do have a look - I cannot believe that it is all free, it is such a fab resource. Having said that, the option to upgrade to 'pro' is there and on the recommendation of a couple of fellow Twitterati, I probably will over half term.

Anyway, I put 8 questions on the topic of health that kept occurring on the WJEC AS French oral cards (e.g. quels sont les risques et pour l'individu et pour la société du tabagisme...) on the spinner, and on the extra information tab I included support phrases. Pupils worked in pairs asking each other the questions, initially with the support phrases visible and then once again without. By the end, their confidence and fluency were really growing, and the randomness of the question spinner meant that they had to be on their toes as they didn't know what was coming next, just in the exam.

post-it swap

This idea came from a resource Clare Seccombe used at ililc3 (surprise, surprise!) but I have taken it a step further with my AS French class.

Step 1 - pupils wrote down in French their best 'whizzy sentences' for talking about the oral cards (WJEC) where the first question is to compare 2 pictures or texts. They then passed it on to the next pair.

 Step 2 - the new pair read out the comments practising pronunciation, then on a post-it, wrote the English meaning and stuck it on top. Once they had checked it was correct, they removed all the post its and passed it on to the next pair.

 Step 3 - we then had a competition to see who could put all the English post-its back on in the fastest time. Once again we practised pronunciation.

 Step 4 - the final pair had to put each phrase into a sentence based on the speaking card we were working on (health in this case). We then shared and peer assessed these.

It worked really well, as they all had different phrases to begin with, so it meant lots of practising was achieved. They also worked well to support each other, offering help when the next pair didn't understand, or correcting each other's language.

(Sorry the pics are all sideways, they aren't on my laptop!)