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Noël pour tous

 I have come across this website which publish a different cartoon everyday.   For each visitor to the site, Orange will give money to the Red Cross to buy Christmas present for under-privileged children. 

Monbeausapin.org est un site de bande dessinée en ligne, qui présente un auteur différent chaque jour. Si vous visitez le site de l'argent sera versé à la Croix rouge pour aider le Noël d'enfants défavorisés.

Isle of Wight Conference

It has been a while now since I attended the conference organised by Joe Dale.  It was a very amazing experience, lots of people have blogged about the workshops that they attended- just follow the links if you want to find more information about it. 
My first workshop was "Thinking outside the box" where Chris Fuller demonstated how he uses mobile phones, i-pods and cheap cameras to motivate his students.  The results are very good and can be seen on Chris'blog.
My second workshop was from podcast to vodcast with Adam Sutcliffe. Adam showed us how to use digital video in the classroom.
In the afternoon, I looked at Animation and produced a short film.  I enjoyed playing with playdough and I am keen to exploit this further with my classes.
I also listened to Sharon Balch talk how she is using AFL.  Her talk was very inspirational and I am certainly going to use some of her ideas in the classroom.

I feel that it was worth spending a week-end looking at new technologies and meeting with teachers who are so enthusiastic about the use of ICT in the classroom. 

For our animation Aurélie, Claire and myself decided to create a dog and a frog and play hide and seek.  Here is the results

Isle of Wight Conference

It will soon be my first blogversary.  I started last year after attending the Isle of Wight Conference organised by Joe Dale.  Lisa Stevens has written about the conference in her last post and like her, I am looking forward my 2 days on the Isle of Wight.
If you want inspiration and see what people are doing in ICT, it is well worth a visit- I am even delaying my holidays to France to attend the conference!!

See you there, I am really looking forward meeting friends!

An IWB trick

Never fails to amaze my students.  Use it with questions or vocabulary.  Backgrounds can be any colour, just choose the colour of the pen to match!




Useful tools

 

Cool Tools for schools is a great site to help you find tools and give you access to different links. It is well designed and will be a great help to students and teachers who want to find resources quickly.

Jog the web

I have come accross this website which allows you to compile a diaporama of your favorite websites. Thank you Florence. I have put together some of my favorite websites.  This will allow some of you to access them more easily, I hope.  This could be a good way of revising during the Summer holidays.

Have a look at Jog the Web

IWB challege week 4

I have come to the end of my challenge and this week i have focused more in using the IWB with the students and as a toll for them.

With Year 7, we have carried on the topic of leisure.  I have imported pictures and written sentences for them to match.  It has certainly been much easier for them to move words and pictures around thanks to the "lock in place" and "allow to move functions" (right-click on the mouse).  We also watched

With my Year 9, I have used Google Map to work on directions. I showed them how to prepare their work by labeling different points on their map,  They are going to show the results of their work on the board.  They produced some invitations for a party and had to give directions to the party. 

With Year  7 we watched the BBc programme called Talk French where students have to identify which sport people liked doing.  We also did the online exercises. (See previous post). 

Year 11 were going on study leave so we did a lot of revision.  We used Interactive websites like linguastars,  and other websites that I have recommended before.  I have enjoyed doing the challenge, I have used the IWB for several years now but having to look at new way to use it has certainly been enlightening.  I am looking forwards exploring Notebook 10 when it becomes available in school.  I will certainly check with the technician.

IWB Challenge week 3

It has been a very interesting week as Monday was Bank Holidays and I did GCSE and AS orals.  Year 9 did their Sats.  However I have carried on using layers (see previous posts) and used Erase and reveal with a few classes, I also used the timer to see how quick they could do it.   The students were very impressed and wanted to know how I did it:  They enjoyed coming to the board and reveal the word that they had guessed- (They had seen the text for a few minutes beforehand).

I am getting more confident in embedding sound and files directly into the board which makes easier to access.   I recorded a text and used the speaker icon to stop.  I was getting the students to tell what came next; they were able to follow the text on the board.

With Year 7, I used Layers.  Although I still need to spend time on Jose Picardo's instructions as I am confused about what to move and when, but I am getting there.

I have also learnt that you can lock what you want into place by right-clicking on the mouse and then pressing "locking into place", pressing "allow to move" makes moving whole sentences or pictures easier when the students come to the board.

Next week, I want to experiment more with layers and see if I can do something with Magshow especially using maps as I am doing directions with my Year 9, I may also have a go at Animoto. 

Weekly Whiteboard workout week 2

This week has been a little difficult with GCSE orals and an Inset day, but I have done a few activities.

With year 7, we revised the –ER verbs as we are moving onto the topic of sports and leisure. I like using songs in my teaching and they love singing verbs. I recorded them singing the verb parler on the tune of "Jingle Bell" (see previous post). We used Audacity. We had a lot of fun and practice.

To introduce sports, I showed a PowerPoint that I made years ago. We did some listening exercises, I had all the Métro CD loaded onto the system last year so it is easy to use the links from the Interactive Whiteboard when needed. I also practised the vocabulary learnt by dragging sentences to match pictures on the whiteboard.

I wanted to emphasise the difference between jouer and faire and I used the marvellous PowerPoints made by Bruno Guillemin from the NGFL Cymru. These are great PowerPoint presentations and the students enjoy listening and watching the clipart from Animation Factory.

Year 11 students have been busy practising for their oral exams so we used the recording that I did on my blog for revision work. We were able to extend the answers by copying and pasting the sentences on the whiteboard. I recorded a couple of presentations using Audacity and we made corrections.

With Year 10, we looked at reading skills, so I used layers again (thanks José for the tips); I changed the shapes and the colours. Students have to identify words which were synonyms with words in the text. We also practised our town vocabulary with a game that I had created on Quia

Next week will be a short week, Bank Holiday on Monday, Orals (again on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon). However I am being watched on Wednesday with my year 10 in order to assess how ICT is integrated in all subjects in the school with emphasis on the use of the IWB. I am intending to carry on with Reading skills by using Erase and Reveal and will investigate other ideas from the websites that I have stored on my delicious.

The Great IWB challenge

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to take part in the Interactive Whiteboard challenge set by Jess McCulloch of Technolote. We have to come up with different ways of using the Interactive Whiteboard each week. As a very keen user of the Whiteboard, I could not ignore this challenge as I felt it will push me to look at new ideas and exploit the idea of the whiteboard.

On Monday, I finished watching "Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain" with my year 10. As I had been ill before the spring holidays, I had a lot of work to get over and we had started watching the film before the holidays. I am planning to explore how to use the board to record parts of films and dialogues.

With my Year 7, I started introducing a new topic. I have started planning my whole lesson on the IWB so I can click on the attachment, I found that you do not to click on the Insert folder but can insert any files directly onto the IWB so it makes it easier to move from one activity to another. I have followed José Picardo's advice on using layers and successfully did an exercise on faire / jouer for sports. I also used this with my Year 10 on living in town or the countryside. I have also used the hide screen to go the different parts of the lesson.