My Hovercraft is full of eels!
For this and other useful phrases in a wide variety of languages (such as Happy Easter, which is what I was looking for in the first place), try Omniglot
Love Comic Life!
Last time I used Comic Life with S2 they were in 5 groups, we had 2 cameras and 1 iBook with Comic Life on it. Last Tuesday when we started our new comics we’d 2 cameras and 2 iBooks and 5 groups. They are very patient at waiting their turn with the camera, each group gets 10-15 minutes to start with - they come back, we quickly download the photos and they start their comic whilst the next groups go off.
Yesterday though I discovered something to make life even easier - all new iBooks come with Comic Life already on them. We had just bought a couple with some Gaelic funding. A quick check this morning confirmed that they did indeed have Comic Life, so this afternoon we had the luxury of 4 laptops. By the time they are ready to finish the comics on Thursday we may have 5 laptops and each group can easily complete their comics - all we need for next time is 5 cameras to make life even easier.
The important thing for me though is that a programme like Comic Life brightens up the otherwise dull topic of Daily Routine - having seen some of the photos I think imaginations have run riot and photos have been taken everywhere from the Home Ec room to the big bins in the playground.
Oh happy day…
iTube seems to be working again - quickly downloaded “Lauren’s new teacher”, when Catherine Tate’s school girl gets a new teacher in the shape of David Tennant and begins quoting Shakespeare, to share with my English colleagues.
Hanging on the telephone…
The end of March is a stressful time, folios need to be completed and uplifted, end of term reports written, speaking assessments done, but what’s been my most stressful experience this week? Spending money.
You would think the gift of money to spend should be a pleasureable experience, the excitement of buying new equipment - I seem to have spent hours on the phone trying to find a company who could supply iPods and invoice us within the next week.
Amazingly Apple themselves couldn’t do it, I’m still waiting for another company to return my calls and Argos couldn’t guarantee setting up an account and delivering the goods. Eventually PC World were the company able to do the order in time, but not before I had to explain what I wanted 4 times as I was passed around the company and left hanging on the telephone…
However it should be worth it in the end - next week we’ll have iPod videos and the excitement of exploring how we can use them in Gaelic and French.
Communicate.07 Notes
Links to the notes from the seminars at last week’s Communicate.07 conference at Stirling can be found on the SCILT website. I’m hoping that by the time I go to Paris in June with S3 we’ll be able to moblog some of our adventures (I feel a new phone calling out to me). I am still hoping that we’ll be able to blog live from Versailles, but sending something via the phone would be a good experience too.
Downloading from YouTube
When I was preparing for Communicate on Thursday night (nothing like leaving things to the last minute) I tried to download a couple of videos from YouTube using iTube only to find it no longer works. A bit like the Radio Times, other download programmes are also available, but they all seem a bit complicated - any ideas?
Communicate.07
It was at Communicate.06 last year that I was persuaded that setting up a class blog might be useful - at that time I had only been using them to practise reading skills with classes.
This year I was back in Stirling for Communicate.07. This time I spoke about the use that mobile phones might have in the classroom. I coopresented with Sharon Tonner of the High School of Dundee who has been using them with her primary children. Many were keen to go back and try out this technology in their own classrooms - I’ll upload my presentation notes here later when I can get it off the laptop.
Most questions were about child and teacher protection - in fact most of the things we talked about were really using the phone as a digital tool, camera, video, recorder, Bluetooth etc rather than as a phone, so details of numbers are not exchanged.
One thing all were agreed on was that we need to teach pupils the educational uses of new technologies - MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, mobile phones and iPods etc. At the moment we seem to ban them because we ourselves do not fully understand them. When they are used inappropriately our knee jerk reaction is to ban them - interesting when there is an outbreak of graffiti around the school we don’t ban pencils…
Spellmaster (2)
A while ago I wrote about Spellmaster which is a free downloadable programme. We’ve made up a few games in French and Gaelic and they can be found on the Tobermory High School website under Language Faculty and then follow the links under S1/2. We’ll be adding more language games soon having just bought licenses for some of the wonderful games from Content Generator and we are still experimenting with the sound version of Spellmaster.
Let them Podcast…
Have a virtual tour of Versailles by downloading one of their many podcasts and vodcasts. You can find them at http://www.podcast.chateauversailles.fr/ A great resource if you’re thinking of a school visit - no need for the audio guide, pupils could download straight to iPods. There’s also a fantastic digital guide Grand Versailles Numérique with brilliant animated 3D guides and guided tours. All this and according to the site at Versailles you’ll find Internet access and wi-fi access - we’re hoping to take pupils this summer, how cool to blog live where Marie Antoinette once lived.
