Category Archives: Uncategorized

Librivox release recording of the Pirates of Penzance

A recording over five years in the making, it’s worth leaning on what a technical accomplishment this is.

Dispersed volunteers around the world, most of whom have not met each other, have spent five years making a recording which has recently been released. This includes a number of people who have sung chorus parts whose individual recordings in various parts of the world have been skilfully merged into one MP3.

You can download the recording for free.

I’m credited as being in the chorus, although I don’t actually remember making any recordings of this!

MFL and ICT

Today on our University Based Day (UBD) we are having a session on how to use computers in learning foreign languages.

The session is lead by Mr Picardo from Nottingham High School, who has an MA in Information Technology in Education.

You can see from the school’s MFL website, linked above, that they practice what they preach – there are lots of examples of the ICT stuff they have created. They can use a blog post to highlight the work done, and then ask their own children to leave comments peer assessing. They also attract lovely praising comments from the senior staff at the school, and for one memorable activity, from the author of one of the widely used Spanish textbooks.

His personal blog is here – click “Resources” for many things you can use.
To get us in the right frame of mind, he showed us this video.

(And then said… now you know you what heads of department meetings are like.)

The session included voki.com which allows you to put a voice track on a cartoon avatar. This can be used for students to record their speaking assessments in a fun way, which means you can hear speaking, you can upload the results onto a blog and you can peer assess for homework.

We looked at Storybird.com which allows students to make e-books from a text, and lets you search for beautiful pictures to illustrate the word. This can be incorporated into making a perfect draft – students write text in languages; text can be corrected by staff and then turned into a pretty final draft.

Next up was Glogster, which lets you create a multimedia poster, and embed sound and videos into things that look like posters.

Wordle.net – a tool I have already used right here on this blog! In a modern language context, you can use it to make a long text less scary in introduction – by introducing this way, and ensuring they do understand some of the key words, you can help comprehension. You can also run students’ work through it see if they are using some words too often and others too few – if you are saying “my family” every other sentence, could you instead use “my brother, my sister, my dad”? Also wonderful for classroom displays.

The final one we considered was Go Animate which allows students to make their own cartoons – which, new this year, includes the facility to record speech and make an actual production.

I’m big into ICT myself, so in addition to the sites we learned about today, I would suggest the following:

Joe Dale, a national leader in modern languages and ICT, who has a blog.

In particular, he pointed me at a group of language teacher users of twitter who call themselves the MFL Twitterati, who arrange regular meetups and generally share good and interesting stuff.

The Twitterati sent me to Triptico, a lovely set of pretty tools for use in the classroom including timers, name pickers, ordering tool, hourglass, and a really fast word magnet tool that lets you work on word order – magnificent for MFL. Perhaps the tool I have used the most often is the “Find 10″ tool, which makes a lovely simple starter. It does, however, need you to install software on your computer, which not all schools will let you do. There is a facility for MFL teachers to share their resources with each other, but I haven’t figured this out yet.

Dom’s MFL Blog is helpful and has lots of challenging suggestions to improve MFL teaching.

Over to you – do you have anything useful to share about using computers in modern language teaching?

London’s crazy but awesome cable cars

London is in the middle of building a huge set of cable cars crossing the Thames.

It maybe a sign that I don’t read enough news or am reading the wrong things, but the only single place I have read anything about this at all is IanVisit’s quirky London / transport / tunnels blog.

He’s been visiting regularly, taking photos of the construction in various phases, and reports that the cables are due to go in soon.

The progress from “never heard of it” to “open to the paying public” seems to be going ever so fast.

PS, if you’ve never heard of IanVisits before, there’s loads there to love, but you might in particular like his photos of deserted London, taken in the early hours of Christmas morning. It even made the front page of Flickr!

Update: Martin on Facebook gives me a link to this video:

German Word of the Week

This week’s word is die Übernachtungsparty – a sleepover.

So many German words have been on the tip of my tongue when students ask for them, and have to dragged back to the front of my mind kicking and screaming from the recesses of my language learning synapses. But this one was completely new to me. I guess we didn’t have all that many sleepovers when I was at school, but it is now definitely firmly ensconced in the vernacular and social calender of the teenage girls we teach.

Other words I struggled to remember this week, some of which came back in time, others only floated to the surface, esprit d’éscalier like, just too late to be useful:

der Strand – beach
gemütlich – cosy
bequem – comfy

PGCE students as vectors of disease

So, it’s well known that people who work or study in schools or other educational institutions get a lot of coughs and colds. In universities it’s known as Freshers’ Flu, and everyone gets it shortly after Freshers’ Fair.  Essentially a large group of people from diverse areas all meet and exchange bugs, and everyone gets ill.  In schools its the same. All the children have the whole summer to travel the country, go on holiday, and visit family, picking up all the cough and cold bugs they can, which then get pooled back in the school.

And PGCE students? We’re an interface between the two communities. We spend all week picking up the bugs from the children, then on Monday mornings, 250 of us meet back in one air-conditioned lecture hall to share learning about learning, to share best practice, and to co-mingle the bugs from all the secondary-age children in three counties into one big pool of infection.

Seriously, stay away from us. We’re diseased.

Cough. Cough. Sniff.

Chasing an interesting Dragon

A new opportunity has opened up for me – it’s proving an interesting month!

When I started work with Librivox all those years ago, my ulterior motive was ultimately finding paid voice work. It’s something I haven’t tried terribly hard at, to be honest, but every now and again I pop back to LV and tape another chapter. I certainly never managed to find the enthusiasm to rack up the hours and hours of service that some people have managed over there.

But still I keep getting weird and flatting plaudits for my voice and the work I have done. I still get one or two emails a month out of the blue thanking me for the few things I have made available.

And then another interesting project began last year. Out of the cream of Librivox arose Iambik Audiobooks – with many of the same people and processes of Librivox, but with contemporary texts, a more professional approach, a higher quality of recording… and… actual money! With time on my hands, I signed up this summer, and submitted an audition for an interesting text.

I heard back last week that I was successful in that audition, with an incredibly flattering quote from the book’s publisher: “His voice is like butter! so perfect!”

And whilst googling, I found the book’s author has a very engaging Livejournal page and talked about the project publicly. So. I thought. If he can, I can!

Cover of "Chasing the Dragon" novella - a red background with a pencil drawing of a dragon wrapped around the title wordsSo, I am currently making an audiobook of Nicholas Kaufmann’s Chasing the Dragon. It’s a fantastic book, and when I got the proof copy to prepare for recording it, I motored through it in just an afternoon. The lead character is engaging, with a couple of interesting twists that really get you on her side. By the middle of the third chapter, it’s completely unputdownable, you really have a drive to get on and find out who wins. With this kinda novel, you have more than a sneaking suspicion you can guess who’s going to win, but the plot keeps you right to the wire, and you definitely find yourself unable to guess how the “right” outcome could possibly result from where you get to.

What with everything else that’s going on, I really have to get on with making this recording before the rest of life intervenes, so hopefully it will be out soon!

Crocosmia / Montbretia

Earlier today I posted a pic of some flowers in my garden that are doing especially well this year. (At least, the ones in the back garden are. The ones in the front garden are not looking so healthy)

These things in the garden are very pretty this year.

In a sign of how fragmented my socmed life is, they have been separately identified for me by my Dad (via my Mum) on Twitter, and by friends far and wide on Facebook, on Flickr and here on my blog.

All confirm they are montbretia, which is also somehow called Crocosmia.

And by a huge coincidence, Flickr had a blog post about the 6,000,000,000th photo posted to their website today.

Also of montbretia. Somewhat a better photo than mine.

I have half a chance of remembering what this plant is called now!