Lynne Horn

I was given something to think about by a young film maker the other day.  He couldn’t have be more than 13 and was interviewing me at the Language Conference on the Isle of Wight organised by Joe Dale.  The question was, “What piece of technology could you not do without in your classroom?”  I actually didn’t have time to think about it, but I wouldn’t change my answer.  I couldn’t do without the internet.  From downloading French soundfiles and music, watching up to date pop videos in French, learning new languages or just finding the most up to date reading materials possible (and of course blogging!) I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

The only downside it the whole Access Denied aspect when you carefully plan a lesson around a site only to find it blocked in school next morning.  Someone has just sent me a fantastic version of “Ça plane pour moi”, very current because of the adverts, but as it’s on YouTube I won’t be able to show it (it’s here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FarNEJuCpe8&NR, for all you Plastic Bertrand fans - beware it contains flashing images though).

Anyway back to my original point - it’s a great question, what piece of technology could you not do without in your classroom?

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This is going to be the title of a talk I am giving on blogging and using new technology in the classroom in general in a couple of week’s time (the title comes from the only song I have on the iPods in school, one of my S4 boys is turning into Doris Day - he’s never heard of the song, but after 10 minutes of supposedly listening to his French talk, he’d tuned into Doris and now knows all the words.)

Back in March when I was more cynical about blogging and not so convinced of the value of writing blogs I talked about them with Peter Ford at the Communicate ‘06 conference - my part was really talking about the reading of them in language classes.

Anyway a few months on, I now have three and am going to be talking about blogging once more.  When Peter presented his talk at Communicate where the use of powerpoint was discouraged (yes Ewan?), Peter blogged his talk live.  Now I can see an advantage in this, all my notes can be saved and ready to publish as I speak and will then be there for everyone afterwards.  I can also see a major disaster if edublogs is not working or the Internet fails.  So the question is, dare I??

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Daily Routine is a part of the language course I’ve never enjoyed teaching (I wake up, I get up, I get washed, I get dressed and so on - not inspiring!), but over the last couple of years it has become a bit better thanks to ICT.

It started with the discovery a couple of years ago that my hero, Zidane had a piece about his daily routine on his website, so it gave us something more interesting to read!

Now with the benefit of video cameras and digital cameras and programmes such as Comic Life pupils can come up with their own version of Daily Routine stories, today the showers in the boy’s changing rooms was a popular place to film as was the interview room which doubled as a bedroom.  The girls’ toilets also feature - well it gets them out and about.

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