It’s all happening!

I’m using this blog post to document everything that’s going on in my brain/professional life at the moment.

• Leaving a bunch of lessons while I go on camp next week
• Organising presenters for a mini-TeachMeet on Saturday
• Putting together my own presentation for Saturday
• Organising part of the MLTA Conference next Friday, including presenters for the TeachMeet part of the day
• Putting together my own presentation for the conference TeachMeet
• Completing an online Red Cross first aid certificate
• Marking part of the French ab initio May papers for the first time
• Working through the first Module of my Masters and completing the assignment
• Finalising the school Noumea trip and going on the trip in the holidays
• All the other everyday important parts of my job like planning lessons, marking work, setting exams, marking exams, writing Year 12 reports, navigating my role as Senior Tutor

Woah…pretty crazy! I’m going to need to be organised and to manage my time well through all this. At the same time, I don’t want to lose the ability to relax either (not likely!)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,900 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 5 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Here is the screencast I have created to show you what my daybook looks like and how I put it together using OneNote. I am happy to go into more detail about anything if you’re not sure!

Here is my Learni.st about authentic audiences from TeachMeet Mountains Term 4 2012.

A blog post slightly longer than a tweet!

Year 11 had spent 2 lessons in small groups devising ways of teaching sub-topics to the rest of the class. The main topic was health and illness so they broke up into a group doing body parts, a group doing illness and a group doing advice. The highlight of my week (so far) would have to have been all of the class – all boys – singing and doing the actions for ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ in French! Hilarious and they certainly learned something!

I’ve been thinking over the many and varied lessons that have happened in my French classroom over the last little while. I am always amazed at the multitude of skills teachers are required to have on a daily basis! When I started out teaching, I would never have imagined the ways I am stretched each day. I guess the lessons, good and pretty ordinary, have really been driven by the learners, the goals and the content (I’d like to change ‘content’ to ‘concepts’ in the future).

Year 8 have been learning to order food and describe recipes and ingredients which is one of the best topics in French! So of course we have to eat some food to enrich the learning. Here’s a video I made of myself making a treat to take into class. Tomorrow the students get to bring in something French they have made. To bring some authentic French into the classroom, next week the students are going to do a pretend online grocery shop at http://www.houra.fr/

Year 9 have been enjoying their unit on sport and created some really impressive assignments. It worked well that the Olympics have just been! However this past week some new grammar concepts came up and I ended up spending a lot of time doing traditional teacher talk and board notes with the whole class working through answers to translations. I firmly believe this needs to happen otherwise the grammar problems aren’t found before it’s too late. It will be interesting to see how they go over the next three weeks as they are taught by our Prac student teacher.

I was pleased with how a combined Year 12 Beginners and Continuers speaking class went last week. We had four teachers and four activities that the students rotated through. They teamed up into mixed groups of three to allow for some peer teaching as they went to each activity. It was really encouraging to see everyone speaking French for the whole time – the final oral exams are looming and all students are keen to improve their fluency!

Finally I want to mention a lesson I really liked that I did with Year 11. They are also coming up to exams but before the hard slog of exam technique and past papers, I decided to use an idea that I saw at our recent languages TeachMeet – the Dragon Dictation app. So I asked two of the students with iPads to download the app in advance, so we had three iPads (between 10 students) for the lesson. The Dragon Dictation app basically transcribes what you say into French (and many other languages). It was a great way for the students to REALLY concentrate on their pronunciation, and it was fun! I had this set up as one of three stations that the students rotated through. The others worked well too. I had one computer set up with the Lyrics Gaps website open to a French song. This website has cloze exercises matching an embedded YouTube video of songs. It’s really handy because it means I don’t have to make the cloze activity! Finally I had a simple battleships game which allowed the students to practise forming the perfect tense. They enjoyed all the activities and it was important that we could spend time doing fun things that help consolidate their knowledge.

The next few weeks will be a bit different – Year 11 and 12 are out on exams and I will be only observing Year 9 as they are taught by a Prac teacher. I guess that means lessons for Years 7, 8 and 10 will be amazing!

I wanted to write a short blog about the Year 9 French that was due today. We asked the students to write their own question on the topic ‘The French at the Olympics’. The timing of the unit of work on sport couldn’t have been better! The students have really enjoyed their inquiry into the topic.

The method of presenting their research was important for this task. We ask them to present it in either and audio or visual (or both) way and NOT to use PowerPoint! They were given plenty of other options and it’s been exciting to see the results. I am putting them all on their Posterous blog for everyone to see. A nice application of the MYP theory of pedagogy and education.

Here are the task instructions so you can see all the presentation options. Year 9 Culture 2012 Notification

Here is my quick presentation with a bunch of websites to try with your classes. Let me know if you do and how it goes!

I am in the process of writing my short TeachMeet Languages presentation and I want to get some input from other teachers before I get too far into writing it. I want to know what are the biggest problems or challenges facing languages educators in the classroom today. I have a few of my own ideas, but I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought about and I want to make my presentation not just about my personal experience! So far I have thought of: attracting students to language study through to the end of secondary schooling, the increasing emphasis on technology in the classroom, the ‘teacher centered-ness’ of language education, the rise of Google translate…

So, please add what you believe are the biggest issues facing us as languages teachers today, and perhaps offer a solution that’s worked for you.

I started up a Grou.ps private social network today as a place where, ideally, students from Australia can connect and communicate with students in France. I have also listed it on Skype in the Classroom. Finding the students to populate the group is my next challenge – can you help?