Facing the currently unknown

Encouraging creativity at UIMP, Santander

Last Thursday it was an absolute pleasure to spend a day in Santander, northern Spain at Universidad Internacional Menéndez-Pelayo. I had been invited to take part in a week's course about learning from recent advances in English education. All of the teachers are in some way involved in using English as part of their teaching, either as the central subject or to enhance their main subject, such as part of a psychology course. As such they were spared me presenting in Spanish... phew. My focus was on encouraging creativity and to demonstrate that it is possible to move away from "traditional" approaches and acceptances.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed ideas to these presentations. I tried to attribute as much as I could remember to, but if I've missed anyone out then yell and I'll alter things! A huge thank you to José Antonio del Tejo for organising the event as well, it was great fun. And thanks for organising a La Oreja de Van Gogh gig for that night too!!

What can ICT do for us?

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Creative Assessment

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Thinking about creativity

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Exeter PGCE- so what's next?

Apologies that it's taken a few days, but here are the materials from Friday's session in Exeter, I hope it was a useful one for you, even though you were all desperate to head off and celebrate your success at passing! The few games in the ppt at the bottom now have advice for use in the notes section under the slides. Many of the ideas are from Sara Sullivan (in Essex) and Neil Jones (www.mfljones.wordpress.com). There is also, I think, a huge ppt of ideas floating round on TES resources area. And if you ever need any help, feel free to get in touch.

So what's next?

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Download A few games

Creative ideas for post-16 languages

Creative post-16 MFL ide as

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Download Innovative 6th form ideas (just in case you want to share it)

Howdy folks,

this is the powerpoint I based discussions on at Tomlinscote on Wednesday for a very interesting (well I would say that, wouldn't I!) session for Links into Languages. The ideas below were the ones added to my pink post-it learning wall- thanks for the contributions, one and all!

A big thank you as well to Alex Blagona, Nick Mair (blog, man, blog!!!) and Neil Jones for some fascinating discussions as to what constitutes creative MFL teaching.

Ideas

One pupil sits with their back to the screen

- The rest of the class then describe what is on the screen for them to guess

Create a pack of cards with 5 to 10 conjugated verbs in every tense pupils have learnt.

 - Students categorise into correct tenses into a timeline  

- Play snap with the cards- snap for same tense

Mini-whiteboard game: students answer questions by writing answers on the board then showing them quickly to win points

The post-it (rizla) game- pupils write a famous character on a post-it and stick it on a peer's forehead. They then have to ask questions to find out who they all are!

Running dictation- the twist!

- Before doing the dictation, answer a series of questions based on the text outside the room

- After completing the running dictation, translate into English / create a summary

- THEN translate back into Spanish (either the translation or the summary), without now being able to see the Spanish dictation text

- Peer assess

Allow the pupils to create topic booklets to use as teaching materials for the following year

Create a newspaper

- you provide the headlines, they provide an article to accompany it

Give each group (3 or 4 pupils) a list of about 12 words in TL

 - They then have 20 minutes to create a story to read out / act out to the rest of the class using all of these words

Isle of Wight exhaustion, 2007

Yesteday was an amazing experience for me, and for that I have to thank everyone who came to the Isle of Wight conference. It was a fairly inspiring day, with ideas flying around left, right and centre, with a room packed full of people with innovative, creative ideas to enhance all of our teaching.

I fully admit that I was realllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyy nervous before my sessions, and I hope they were interesting for everyone involved- but hey, all feedback is very much appreciated!

I've made the presentations available to download below, but if anyone would alos like me to put any other examples of things on the blog then feel free to add a comment and I'll put things up.

What I also really enjoy about days like yesterday is getting the opportunity to actually meet people who's work you really admire and who you've struck up contact with over the net. So thanks to all of those people, especially to Lisa and David- here's looking forward to the Euro 08 project getting moving!

Good luck with all the ideas as they start to become reality over the next few weeks!

Chris

Download its_a_bloggers_life.ppt

Download blogging_intro_presentation.ppt

Download how_to_use_a_blog.ppt

Download what_is_a_wiki.avi

Download what_is_a_mobile_slideshow_and_how_to_make_one.doc

Cheers jellycast

I hereby give great credit to jellycast, who have addressed a major fault in their service.

I've been using jellycast with my year 11s as they revise for their orals, recording pieces to put onto the wiki thanks to odeo. However, jellycast was unable to cope with having more than 10 series in existence- is there noone else out there producing more than 10 different things on the ENTIRETY of jellycast? Anyway, their very helpful help team have now introduced a far better navigational system, so thank you very much!

I'll let you know in the next few weeks how the wiki experiment's coming on... The pupils seem enthused, which as I'm sure you'll all agree when it comes to oral preparation, is something. HOwever, it really has got me thinking about just what you can do with wikis...