Qu’est-ce qu’il y a dans ton sac?
This crops up as part of the S1 unit on school - pupils love taking everything out of their bags and talking about it. I came across this site today via mfl resources - it’s a blog called Un sac de filles. Basically women are invited to take a photo of the contents of their handbag and blog about it - don’t feel left out gentlemen, you can talk about what’s in your pocket! It would make a good basis for a speaking task for pupils who could either do it for themselves or make it up for a celebrity or for a fictional character.
Of course Websense is still blocking all things blog related, so this useful resource may be out of bounds for the foreseeable future.
Reading en espagnol.
With the approach of S3 exams I did a couple of periods on reading skills. I’ve found a useful way of teaching this is to start with a passage in a language they don’t know. I use Spanish because of its similarities to French. I did a little many years ago, but find I can follow text. I downloaded and printed a new article from yahoo.es and similar articles from the French and English yahoo sites.
Pupils found they could easily access the article - they worked out what it was about as they’d heard about it on the news, they looked for cognates - words they could work out from French and English and using what they knew of the story could begin to work out the meaning of quite lengthy chunks of passage - all without using a dictionary. When it came to then looking at some Credit French passages their reaction was, “Is that all?” and indeed the results of their reading exam bears out this confidence in handling language - and all because it takes seconds to find a current news item in pretty much any language of your choice online.
Driving round the bend…
Intrigued by other posts on google maps, I had to give them a go - I typed in Tobermory-Oban. Instruction number 5 suggests a left turn towards Oban. At this point you would drive off the end of the pier, however a couple more days of Websense and I might be tempted…
Making Sense of Websense
We are trialling Websense in school as an alternative to iGear. Now I’m not a great fan of iGear and Jeff, our technician has suggested that with patience using Websense, the future will be a surfing Utopia. Well, I’m not particularly patient - so far it’s blocking pretty much anything with Blog in the url (apart from our PiE Team communication blog), I’m assured these will be unblocked. Our school website was blocked. Biggest disaster for me was finding that on one of my favourite sites http://tf1.fr, all the video clips were blocked - it’s my main reason for using the site. Next week I start looking at the weather in French with S1 and it will be a bit of a disaster if we can’t get the updated forecast videos which give the lessons a bit of reality.
So in the long run will Websense make more sense? Only time will tell, watch this space!
Independently Cooperative!
A bit of a contradiction in terms, but whilst S3 were working in cooperation with each other this morning, they were pretty much independent of me. They are working on their own Guide Pratique for Paris - the finished version will include useful phrases as well as a bit of information about some of the places to be visited on our whirlwind tour of Paris.
There will be two versions of the finished product - a printed version which everyone can cary with them and an online version which will have downloadable podcasts of some of the vocabulary and phrases and links to useful sites to prepare before we go.
So far they are working on a guide to the Métro, useful phrases in case you are lost, shopping phrases and a guide to Paris. Interestingly although they went online to look for some websites and quickly found the wonderful interactive transport map of Paris, they didn’t look for any phrases online (and no sign of them using the dreaded online translation sites), preferring the dictionary and text books instead (maybe they do listen to me sometimes!).
They chose their own groups which had to be mixed and have 3-4 members, the final work has to be clear, easily accessible for others to use and to be their own work (I’ve offered my fees as an interpreter at an extortionate price if they are sued for breach of copyright if they copy and paste from other sites or books found in the library). So far they are working well on their own - my only task was to ask why Cliff Richard singing “Congratulations” suddenly boomed out across the room - from the look of the boys on the computer at the time, I don’t think they knew the answer…
You’re Fired!
It’s only week 1 and I’m already hooked on Series 3 of The Apprentice. I’m sure in this enterprising culture we’re living in, there are 100s of uses for this series (apart maybe from the colourful language!). Indeed Maths teachers might like to work out how much coffee could have been made with 200 litres of milk, and Science teachers muse on the fact that milk increases in volume when it’s frothed up…
As a language teacher there is one little clip from this week’s show that I found particulary useful, when Tre and Simon, arguably the most successful at selling coffee were out on the streets selling, at one point they were speaking to potential customers in German and Japanese - a useful reminder that whilst you may buy in your own language, you sell in the target language.
Useful clip when promoting languages in school - I can’t find it yet on YouTube, but hope it may be there soon.
