Who you gonna call? LOTE Busters!

I have just spent the last two days in a room with 30 or so other LOTE teachers at the LOTEBUSTERS conference talking about all sorts of things. It was a fantastic two days of networking and sharing ideas and hearing about all the great things that are going on in LOTE classrooms in Grampians and Barwon South West Regions of our state. The conference was called LOTE Busters and it was organised by the Centres for Excellence in Languages which are based in Warrnambool, Essendon and Berwick. Unforunately funding for those centres finishes this year, but hopefully we can keep the communciation going in to the future.

Here are some of the best ideas and conversations I had at the conference:

using a co-curricular approach in teaching – the example we were shown by Richard Myddleton from Essendon and Keilor College was a unit on terrorism for Year 9. This unit focussed on the Sarin gas incident which occurred on the Japanese subway in 1996 and was a great example of involving English, Science and Japanese. You can download this (coming soon) and other units from the Centre for Excellence website.
using Microsoft Publisher to create a LOTE newsletter for your school. One newsletter a term that contains events happening in the LOTE department, snippets of students work, interviews with Yr 12 students and international students, puzzles and games etc. It would be a great project to get the students to take responsibility for. Some other ideas that came out of the group discussion about things you could include in the newsletter were:
- phrase of the week / character of the week
- LOTE film reviews
- Offbeat news from the LOTE department and from the country of the language you are studying
- Pop culture section
- links to online games and interesting websites
- competitions
- proverbs or sayings either in the LOTE or in English
- exchange rates and what you can buy for $10 in the target country
I love this idea and am aiming to have a newsletter out by the end of term. See how I go! I might call it ‘Chinese Whispers.’
I learnt a lot of new games that I will be putting up on the LOTE Games page.
I really enjoyed a session on Authentic Communication in LOTE. Students will be much more engaged when they know that there is a REAL purpose to them using the LOTE. This session was again taken by Richard Myddleton – I’m going to have to interview this man for the technoLOTE podcast! – and he spoke about research done by Melbourne University that found students in the middle years, above anything else, wanted to USE the LOTE they were learning and one way to engage them was to create opportunities for them to do this. Some examples of authentic tasks and communication opportunities are: having the students find their way around a certain area with the directions written in the LOTE; students create a map of their school labelling it in the LOTE for visiting sister school students; similarly, they could translate some of the school rules into simple phrases in the LOTE; they could write a weather report ready for visiting students. A normal task such as writing an introduction paragraph about yourself which is often done at a year 7 level could be turned into an email that is then sent to students at the sister school, giving the task an authentic purpose. The students then know they have to get it right and tend to be more motivated because they know it will be seen and read by someone else who will need the information they are writing.
I’ve now got plenty of ideas for things to blog about and share!

I also took the opportunity to talk a bit about what technoLOTE is all about and to start up the technoLOTE email discussion list. If you’d like to be part of the list – which is a google group – just let me know by sending an email to jess@technolote.com and I will add you. My aim for the group is to connect LOTE teachers from anywhere and everywhere and to have some great discussions about what goes on in our classroom as well as a few tutorials on how to do some ‘techno’ things. Looking forward to hearing from you!

To read a bit about the K12 Online conference 2007, click here.

Language Quotes for Inspiration

A few days ago I found a website that has some great language learning quotes, chose a few and put them up in my classroom. I love a good inspirational quote and these are the ones I picked hoping they will appeal to some of my students:

“Give your mind a chance to travel through foreign languages.”
Neil Simon

“You can’t see other people’s point of view when you have only one language.”

Frank Smith

“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.”

Frank Smith

“Through learning language, we learn about culture.

Through learning about culture, we learn respect for others.

Through learning respect for others, we can hope for peace.”

From another site, Omniglot, I found this quote:

“Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you’re just used to it.”
- Linguistic Mystic

For more on Promoting LOTE check out this post: A Special Year for Languages and how all teachers can help.

3 Series on Podcasting: DIY Podcasting!

Here is a series of four instructional videos I put together to show you how to use Audacity to create a podcast and then to make it web-ready with iTunes. I used the SMART Board Recorder to make these videos, and I had to compress them quite a bit, so please forgive the less than perfect quality! Hopefully they are helpful to you. Stay tuned too, as my next podcast is coming soon and I’ll be interviewing someone who had won an award for his use of podcasting. It has allowed him to put the human side back in to teaching.

Anyway – on to your own podcast! I’d love to hear your results so please let me know how you go.

Part 1: The Microphone Check

Part 2: Making and Recording Noises!

Part 3: Importing Music and Sound Effects

Part 4: Making Your Podcast Web-ready with iTunes

For some ideas on how to use podcasting in your classroom, click here.

Do You Sing What I Sing?

Recently I have been part of a project called Voices of the World, which is run by Sharon Tonner, a teacher in Dundee, Scotland. Sharon has made contact with various teachers around the world and each month we get a new task that we have to complete with our students. The task for October was to record the class singing the national anthem, and then create a slideshow with the recording and some pictures to go with it. Click here to go to the Voices of the World wiki page, and then click on October’s Task to get to the page with all the national anthem slideshows. You can hear kids from Australia, NZ, the US, Canada, Estonia, Denmark, France, Spain, Scotland, Indonesia, Greece and England singing their national anthems. My class is the 7th slideshow down. The slideshows were made with Animoto which is a great way of making online slideshows.

There will be a new Voices of the World Task every month, so stay tuned! If you are interested in becoming part of Voices of The World, check out the Ning network One Voice that Sharon setup.

To read about another Voices of the World task we have done, check out this post: Voices of the World Twinkle Away.

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