Lynne Horn

Build Your  Wild Self comes from New York Zoos and aquariums.  I am coming to an end of a unit on hobbies with S1 and with that we will have finished a few units which all deal with personal information, descriptions, family, likes/dislikes etc  I haven’t done pets as it’s covered in primary, but might do a little revision of them so we can use this site.  I thought if they created their new wild self they could then do a presentation based on this to the the rest of the class - at the very least their group.  This kind of presentation is part of one of the ACfE language outcomes, which requires a presentation following research - we are probably going to trial this part of the Gaelic learner’s outcomes and I know they’ve just finished presentations in English, so in the spirit of transferring skills and language, a little practice in French should be useful.  In fact a little unit on animals which incorporates a few French fables might be even better…

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This little French poem - the more interesting equivalent of “he loves, he loves me not” could pretty well sum my feelings about technology sometimes!

Today I’ve loved hearing S1 record their love poems and watched as two pupils took responsibility for the recordings, allowing everyone a little practice time before they recorded.  I loved even more the recordings of Edith Piaf singing “La vie en rose” and “Hymne à l’amour” which I played to S3 and S5/6.  S3 just listened to it and read the words and translation - in fact they want to hear her sing “Je ne regrette rien” without the distraction of the Specsavers ad.  S5/6 used “L’hymne à l’amour to practise translation”  In a rash moment I said I would teach S1/2 Hava Nagila - not that I’m fluent in Hebrew, but I learned it at school and it’s my language input to the Judaism day taking place in a couple of week’s time! - as always YouTube turned up trumps and I found a very fast version played by a full orchestra.

However any relationship with technology is a bit of a love/hate affair - this was the second attempt at recording the poems, I discovered yesterday that there is a tiny little button on the mics which needs to be pointing to “mic” and not “line” - hence the reason why nothing recorded yesterday had any sound.  Some of the stuff recorded this morning sounded fine in iTunes but imported into Garageband at high speed and I still haven’t worked out why.  In the middle of S2 the computer decided it couldn’t read my memory stick which had last period’s work saved onto it (fortunately they had copies in their jotters).  And of course there are the frustrations of “access denied”…  I came home to find that the computer had decided it couldn’t read my aol stuff so had to reinstall it - infact it has now installed some toolbar I don’t want and can’t get rid off.

On the whole I am normally in love with technology - S3 today decided to go out and try the little poem on real daisies - like them I sometimes have to try more than one daisy before I decide how much in love with technology I am.

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I’ve just uploaded 5 new podcasts - 3 are from S2 discussing cinema (task was to make it like a radio discussion). 

 S3 were challenged to come up with something to teach and revise regular verbs - they’ve done this very well on the whole.  Although they thought they’d finished on Friday, I got my colleague in learning support who is also a French teacher and the classroom assistant to cast a critical eye (or rather ear) over them.  The groups they had to improve their podcasts. 

Listening to all of these again there are still errors, but once all are uploaded I’m going to use these to “extend learning” (quote from HMiE!) - to see if they can spot the errors and think about how they can be improved.  We’d an interesting chat at our Faculty meeting about the use of questions and reminded ourselves of the importance of “error analysis” with classes to help them improve.

It’s been a interesting few days getting into using the iPods and iBooks - as always there have occasions when I have wanted to scream, but overall the results are worth it.  A group of S4s chose to present their hotel role play as a podcast and recorded and edited it in around 20 minutes this morming and I’ll upload it tomorrow - once I find which iBook they saved it onto!

Tobermory French podcasts

(some are still converting and haven’t appeared yet!)

 UPDATE:  THEY HAVE FINALLY BEEN CONVERTED AND APPEARED ON SITE - ONLY TAKEN 24 HOURS!

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Inspired by a suggestion from a conference I was at last week from HMI (and I think the idea comes from St Ninians originally?), I got S1 to put the phrases they’ve been using to talk about hobbies to well known tunes.  Now you might not realise it from listening to them but two of these are meant to be to Baa Baa Black Sheep, but in my mind I couldn’t separate it from Twinkle, Twinkle and as I was helping the two groups concerned I put them off the tune.

Class responded well to this - done in cooperative groups in 30 minutes they were allocated tunes randomly and had 30 minutes to write their song and then copy it onto big sheets of paper so we could all see.  We recorded them this morning using an iPod and mic - if you are about to listen to them I should apologise at this point, to be able to read the words I had to stand at the back of the class and I had the mic, class had their backs to me reading the words, so unfortunately although there were 30 of them singing, my voice is the one that can be heard, but they deserve to have their work played to the world - in future I’ll get one of them to record from the front!

Tobermory High Podcasts

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…because I managed to unpack (finally) some of many iPods, for which we (at last) have mics and was able to charge seven of them at once (the multi usb thing actually works!), so they can be used tomorrow.  S3 have never podcast before but were very motivated today writing scripts to do podcasts on regular French verbs - they know they can’t get it wrong, someone might looking to learn about regular verbs might pick up their podcast and use it to learn.  I could hear S2 fluent speakers podcasting this afternoon and my own S2s are going to use them tomorrow.  S4 are about to book into hotels using a media of their choice.  I hate seeing equipment unused and these iPods have been annoying me for a while until we got together all the bits and pieces to make them work.  Roll on tomorrow!

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Tomorrow I’ll be looking at booking into a hotel with S4, eventually we’ll be doing a role play based on this.  However when choosing a hotel to use an example I like to start at the top so we’ll be looking at the websites of the Four Seasons (George V) and the Ritz.  Usually the photos are enough to provoke discussion before we even start on anything else.  I’ve just had a look at the Valentine “specials” (doesn’t seem to be classy enough to describe them) - 950 euros per couple in the Espadon restaurant, I can see some interesting bookings and role plays coming up!

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