Module 6

I enjoyed learning about both bubbl.us and Glogster in this unit and as you can see I managed to combine both applications together and post them on my blog! First I created a mindmap about my reflections of Web2.0 as a learning tool. I found that I had to keep each box fairly brief or it was hard to keep track of the mind map and read it easily. Then I made a mind map of French verb revision as an example of something I could use in class with my Year 8 students covering the verbs we have done so far. This is what I included in my glogster poster.

The glogster poster was a lot of fun to create - it took me a while to play around with all the effects you can add in but it was fairly straightforward to use. I can imagine my students loving glogster and it would be a great tool for them to create posters for the different topics we study. I can think of family, pets and food as topics in which this would work really well. I'll have to check if all my Yr 8s are over 13? It would also be great to create pages as a teacher to upload to the school network site for French - in fact, I think I'll try and link my glogster page so that it's ready to go for the start of Year 8 next year!

Until next module...

Module 5

This module dealt with tools that I am mostly already familiar with so I did find it a bit quicker to get through the content, but at the same time it reminded me how much time you can spend ( and sometimes waste!) looking through iTunes and YouTube. I already had iTunes on my computer and use it mainly to buy songs for my iPod and to upload my own music from my own CDs. I had not really used the podcasts or vodcasts available through the itunes store, many of which are free. I found this very interesting and I did subscribe to one of the ABC's Educational podcasts - this week it was on the state of language teaching in Australia so was very relevant to me! I also subscribed to a Japanese podcast which will be useful to help refresh my dwindling level of Japanese.

With the new Mac laptops staff have received in my school I have played around a bit with creating podcats and movies with my students in French class. Each class recorded their own podcasts of role-plays they wrote themselves earlier this year, so I can see many uses for this in the languages classroom.

YouTube I have not used a lot and generally we do not have access to it at school (although I do now). I found some great videos on there made by students on why studying French is important which I think would be great to show in class. I can really see how students will relate a lot more to watching a YouTube video created by students their own age than listening to me go on about it! I also found video clips by French pop singers, eg Lorie that I had forgotten about. I used to show these film clips on a video at my last school and then create a worksheet focussing on grammar etc so I will definately use these now that I can access them easily for the classroom on YouTube. Teacher Tube also looks like a great resource.

I did get many ideas from watching the videos on YouTube etc - there were some on verb revision, learning body parts, culture etc - so digital story telling is something I could see myself using to allow students to download mini revision lessons on topics we have done. Garageband would be a great way of doing this on the Mac and it says it then allows you to upload your podcast or vodcast to the school server. This is definately something I would like to see if I could do at our school as I think it would really engage the students and they could even play a part in creating the revision for their peers.

As usual this module provided plenty to think about and lots of inspiration for changing my traditional way of teaching - just like in the YouTube video on New Literacies!