Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte

Languages Show 2009 - Are we thinking? Then I'll begin...

I am on the train for the third time this week. My beautiful wife and I had a fantastic weekend at the Teaching Awards last weekend. The only pity was that there were no languages National Winners ( I won a national award in 2004 - them were the days!) apart from that, it was great to meet some old friends and the new winners. Anyhow, less of my galavanting -the wife and I are on our way from Newcastle to London again today to attend the Languages Show 2009. I have the privilege to be presenting a seminar on Saturday describing how we have remodelled our languages curriculum at Cramlington Learning VIllage. In my last post, I embedded a video describing our FLIP lessons at school and it has caused some discussion. Isabelle Jones, after watching the video, grilled me on the ins and outs of our approach to the curriculum which goes much deeper than just FLIP lessons and you can read her resulting blog post here.

...I am now writing in pain as my wife has just (deliberately?) poured half a cup of (thankfully) luke warm National Express Train coffee all over my leg. She thinks it is hilarious, I on the other hand...

Anyway, below is my presentation for Saturday outlining, in a little more detail, our curriculum model. I am off to try and deal with my wet leg...

Cramlington Teaching and Learning Conference 2009

284 delegates cam along to the 8th annual Cramlington Teaching and Learning conference on Friday - a massive crowd for what turned out to be a fantastic event. I was asked to lead three sessions. The first one was about how we had developed our new KS3 curriculum. This seemed to go down well with the delegates and I have embedded the prezi I used below.

After that, we looked at how technology could help make language learners in to language creators using simple and free technology such as Audacity, GoAnimate and Glogster. We created an etherpad (a simultaneously editable web document for collaboration) to keep our collective notes - click here to see the etherpad.

Finally, the final session was all about developing higher order thinking skills in language learners and Miriam Barrachina and I demonstrated the use of mysteries, venn diagrams and fact or opinion resources. We did not even get onto looking at living graphs because of the in depth discussion we had about the impact on target language and what the learning objectives of this style of lesson might look like. You can see the presentation here.

I ad a great day and enjoyed hearing Alistair Smith talk about learning generations, even if it was from the corridor where I was assigned to usher in late comers!

It's only glogging Christmas!!!

I have put together a couple of fun listening activities based around Christmas in French on a glog to be used with my classes. You can download the questions for La maison de Père Noël here and the answers are linked into the glog. As for the irritating Pigloo, you can download the noel gap fill questions here. I must thank the lovely Lesley Welsh who freely shared the pigloo gapfill at her wonderfull SSAT lead practitioners event. If you want to use this glog, the link is http://charte.glogster.com/Noel-Flip-lesson---listening-for-fun/