alice’s posterous

After an interesting week at my school, this video reminds me that I am in the right when I try to teach my students some IT skills!
First I found out that most of my students didn't know how to do a slideshow using PowerPoint or Open Office Impress, which is even better because it is free to download so very cheap for schools to use. I had planned for my students to do a presentation on a Latin American country and we spent most of the lesson learning how to do a slideshow on a computer. Then, some students asked me if they could use Wikipedia to research their countries. I told them that of course, it was ok to use it! They told me some teachers did not allow them to use it because most of the time the content was wrong as the contributors were not "professionals". I showed them the discussion page where people can discuss, alter some of the content and they were amazed to discover this page. Obviously some teachers are scared of the revolution going on and talk about things they don't even know (which annoys me the most!).

This video comes from a very good post about the mandatory Youtube videos to watch. I had watched most of them but not this one:

What about you? do you feel a "lonely web enthusiast sometimes"?

Today, I got very exciting when I checked my email box and found an email form one of my year 8 student (12-13 years old) saying:

Hello, miss, here is my montage. I would like you to know that I couldn't find a music that would fit in my presentation, I tried my best.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the presentation.
Take care
bye

See My Montage 5/25/09 online.

For the past few weeks, I have worked with my year 8 class on a project about holidays. I asked them to prepare a spoken presentation about what they usually do on holidays and to add pictures on One True Media. It allows you to create a presentation with pictures and sounds (a bit like Animoto). I recorded my students' spoken presentations on Audacity and saved them as mp3 files. They then added their voices to their One True Media presentations. All of this was class work and I never asked my students to finish the work at home. So I was very happily surprised when I received this email on a Sunday evening! This student had got to one true media on her own and finished the presentation on her own! This is the first time it happens to me and this is all due to the power of web 2.0!

What about you? Have you had students working on their own without you having "to bribe" them? Do you think web 2.0 tools engage our students much more?

This slideshow from Neil Jones is full of ideas to teach languages with links to other subjects such as Art, Science, Geography, History...

It is part of the changes to the MFL curriculum in the UK and means that there are no set topics anymore. It also means a greater emphasis on active learning and creativity and students working on engaging topics, which is what I am looking for as a language teacher!

Looking at the excellent ideas showed on this presentation, I am thinking of working on a project related to Spanish Art, maybe related to Dali or Picasso. I need to think about it ...

What about you? Have you taught languages with a link to other subjects?