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!