I did manage to pop along to church on Monday night for a brief look see of the bells out of the tower before they were taken to the foundry for attention.
There were a few other ringers there including our youngest recruit who had been there since (primary) school kicking out time and had been having a whale of a time having a hands-on go at the heavy engineering, and actually got to help lower the bells from the tower.
Now they are out, they look tiny to me. I have seen them a few times as I have done some basic maintenance on them in situ, including botch repairing to shrouding and fitting muffles. In their frame, when they are hard to access and you have to do a lot of clambering to get to them, they seemed much more imposing than when they sat, mute and clapperless, on sheets on the church floor.
The 10cwt tenor (and the bells have handled so badly for so long it is always surprising to see the tenor is only 10cwt!) is barely waist high when removed from its person-sized wheel.
As the bells were being worked on, the wheels showed just what poor condition they were in, almost collapsing as they were removed. It really was probably only months before one of them broke whilst being used.
A few other things: these bells are surprisingly cracked around the rims.
We were there during choir practice, and the choir was getting going on Christmas carols, which made the evening a little surreal.
And the musicians were also keen to hear the bells when they were down. Whacking the 8 bells with a big spanner in sequence leaves you in no doubt at all just how out of tune they are with each other!
Yesterday we rang for a service at Daybrook St Pauls for the last time for a good few months.
Our tower captain’s decades of fundraising have finally paid off and the bells are due a big renovation, including some tuning work, and a new frame, lower in the tower.
They have been getting steadily worse over the few years I have been ringing them, and some, in particular the 5, have something seriously wrong with them.
Yesterday afternoon, bellhangers were doing preparatory work and today, the bells will be lowered down the tower.
Tonight from 7pm there will be an opportunity to see the bells as they will be in the nave of the church on display to the public. If you can pop along to see them you will be very welcome.
Tomorrow, Frank Key Builders Merchants are very kindly loaning the use of a flat bed lorry and crane to take the bells to Loughborough where they will be serviced by Taylors.
The band has been growing in recent months and there are some keen new ringers who are learning the ropes, if you will excuse the pun. Whilst our own bells are out being spruced up, we are relocating for practice nights to Basford St Leodegarious, 7.30-9pm on Friday nights. If you’d like to come along and have a go, we’d be happy to see you.
The bells are due back just before Christmas, although that is a slightly ambitious time frame and it may take a little longer than that.
Stories I have heard about how mean school HR staff and headteachers go about recruiting. I have no way of knowing whether or not they are true.
1)
The school had a preferred style for referring to its charges. They were students, not pupils or children. They were referred to consistently on the school’s website as students. Applicants who used the wrong word in their application letter were summarily rejected, regardless of their other suitability.
2)
The school preferred neat, organised candidates. Whilst the applicants were busy with interview day procedures, the school sent someone out to look at their cars in the car park. If they were untidy or messy or showed other signs of a less than organised personality, including not being regularly washed, then it was a black mark for that candidate.
3)
Horror of horrors – the school made all sorts of IT available to the candidates for their interview lesson… but planned to hit the trip switch half way through the lesson. How well could the candidate continue teaching when they didn’t have their planned electronic resources available to them?
(This last one happened, not during an interview, but during an Ofsted observed lesson, to a colleague at school. The homework sheet became the rest of the lesson.)
I don’t think most schools would do anything like the three above horrors, and I have not been subject to anything like it on interview myself. Most of my interview days have actually been quite nice affairs, with headteachers keen to show their schools in the best possible light and all the candidates being super collegiate in the inevitable long pauses as we wait for the next activity.
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.
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?
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:
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
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.
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