Opportunities for Using ICT in Primary MFL Teaching

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

Joe Dale has been blogging recently about the work he has been doing “..with members of the CILT Primary Team including Thérèse Comfort, Lucy Adamson, Helen Groothues and Katie Szeless as well as Jim McElwee MFL consultant for Redcar and Cleveland LA on expanding the ICT element of the new QCA Schemes of Work for KS2 French.”

I think this is great news; ICT is an immense help in the primary classroom, both for learning and teaching. Moreover, ICT needs to be embedded across the Primary Curriculum and recognised as an indispensable tool rather than an exotic add-on.

Now I am definitely not a ‘Techie’ so this list of my favourite ICT that I use regularly in the classroom only includes stuff that is dead easy to use. Please feel free to add your favourites and any tips too!

• Powerpoint: Sometimes to introduce a topic, though more often I create powerpoint presentations with embedded sound for colleagues who may be a little wary of their own pronounciation. Joe Dale has great tips on how to use ‘triggers’ to turn a powerpoint into real practise of vocab – a sort of electronic flashcard routine. And my favourite tip from the IOW conference was how to create objects that move around within a slide, so the powerpoint behaves like an IWB. Download The Magic Powerpoint Macro.ppt Devon LA has produced the Catherine Cheater recommended books on Powerpoint with sound which makes them much easier to access for whole class teaching. Children also find the templates in powerpoint easy to use to create their own books and presentations.
• IWB: Great if you are lucky enough to have one. (If not see trick above with powerpoint). There are different types and I love my Smart Board software and that the children can move objects around and write with their fingers. A quick google search will produce lots of free notebook presentations to use to manipulate text and images. The other sort where you have to use a ‘pen’ has a huge languages collection all ready made up in the inbuilt gallery. Makes life much easier to link to CDs, videos and the Internet – no more lugging Boom Boxes around!
• Audacity: Free program easily downloaded from the Internet is ridiculously easy to use to record your own and the children’s voices. We’ve got it on every networked computer now and children can easily record themselves practising conversations, reading aloud and playing it back to themselves (which is a real revelation for many children), creating their own Radio shows and even trying their own version of a Eurovision song contest.
• Podomatic: We use this site to upload our recordings and podcast to the Internet. We spent a lot of time first listening to other schools podcasts to give us ideas and show us the way. Paul Harrington and Joe Dale were instrumental in showing us how fantastically easy and non-techie it is to do.
• Videos: As well as showing DVDs and CD-roms such as Salut Serge to a whole class, there are lots of video clips you can either show straight from the Internet or download to show offline. My Youtube favourites are the Pigloo songs and the ‘Petit Ours Brun’ series.
• Windows Media Player: If you ‘rip’ (hip cool way of saying record or transfer – just click the rip button and it does it for you!) the tracks from your music CDs to store in the ‘library’ directly on your classroom computer it makes it a lot quicker and easier to access exactly the right track in class, especially if like me your desk is not the tidiest....
• Webcam: No really! And nowadays they are like ronseal and do exactly what they say on the tin. So when you’ve finished clicking on webcams around the world to view inside that little baker’s making croissants in Paris and other funspots around the world, plug one in to your class pc and balance it on top of the board. Take snapshots of people and get children to annotate the pictures/add descriptions in the target language. Use it to record yourselves and try using an Internet connection to use Skype and communicate with partner schools on both teacher to teacher and class to class levels.
• Skype: I am finding this tricky to set up at school because of our firewall / techie problems, but once we’ve got this sorted out I know from home use it’s going to be so much easier to exchange ideas and chat with our partner schools and it’s free! Paul Harrington is my Skype expert of choice.
• Blogs: Basically a platform or public audience for children’s work. They are sooo easy to set up and the children are immensely motivated by being able to see their work online and that others can see it. Comments can be moderated easily, switched off altogether and/or teach the children to use comments in a constructive way along the two stars and a wish method. Blogging is also highly addictive and every child in our school now has their own blog (on a private ning so only we can see them) in addition to our public page.
• Online games and sites to practise language skills: From the subscription sites such as Atantot to freebies such as Poisson Rouge and Digital Dialects, there are loads of fantastic online games to practise just about every vocabulary area in any language on the web nowadays. Demo to the whole class and/or let children access them individually or in pairs at the computer.
• Word: Simple word publishing programs to allow children the opportunity to produce and present their work in an attractive manner. Create mock newspapers, copy the style of children’s books and get children to collaborate to produce their own (Eric Carle particularly good for this), show children how to create accents and insert characters, make their own flashcards using clipart..
• Voicethread: online tool where children add their own comments (written or recorded) to a picture or series of pictures which you or they can upload. Great for story telling or talking about images and descriptions. I know Lisa Stevens uses one to share Ted E Bear stories with a Canadian partner school.
• Excel: Quite simply, every time we do ask questions and create survey in the target language we turn it into a barchart, practising maths and ICT as well as language with a purpose.
• Animoto: another online tool, upload pictures and your own soundtrack (or use theirs). Great for making your own funky videos to go with children singing songs in target language – Eurovision again! Or check out these National Anthem and local area images made by schools around the world as part of Sharon Tonner’s Voices of the World project. (We linked making ours to signs and symbols in RE by discussing what images represented our country/other countries and why? Were they realistic, fair?)
• Digital Camera: Take photos of area to label, create maps and dislpay or send to partner schools. Record improvisations (see the Alien sock puppet video) or scripted presentations, such as Weather forecasts just like on the telly.

The list could go on, but these uses of really are simple and easy to include. In fact I do not know where I would be without recording devices like the camera and my mp3 as they are a great help to my classroom management – the children have to provide proof of what they did while I was working with another group! So what are your favourites – share ideas anyone?

[Barbara Jones]

Photostory3
I have used this is in a number of ways with the children. The program is free to download from Microsoft and the childrenpick up how to use it incredibly quickly. I tend to use it with the Y5s and Y6s more than the younger ones but that is only a management issue as there is access to the Ict Suite when I am teaching them.
It allows them to make a presentation with photos (we sometime s use stock photos, sometimes their own) text and speaking, they can also add background music.
I like it particularly because there are no constraints on the children, the least able can achieve a very presentable piece of video with images and them speaking. The brighter children can put in far greater detail and more complex stuctures.
Barbara

[Jo Rhys-Jones]

Thanks for that - off to download a copy and explore further!

[Joe Dale]

Have a look at this post on Photo Story 3. It could be useful:
http://joedale.typepad.com/integrating_ict_into_the_/2006/05/tes_ict_blog_no_5.html

Joe