MFL Conference – Creative Use of ICT for Spanish at Y5/6

I delivered a workshop at the Forward With Languages Conference, held at the Holiday Inn, Sheffield, on the 23rd June. My topic was Creative Use of ICT for Spanish at Y5 and Y6 - based on the work I’ll be doing on our Spanish summer school this year (see here for more details).  I prepared the presentation with Paula Lewis, the Primary MFL link teacher at Meadowhead School, who unfortunately couldn’t make it on the day of the conference.

Here is a link to the presentation I gave, which showcases a number of (mainly web-based) tools for supporting language learning – these tools could easily be used across all key stages and languages, but our focus was how they fitted in with the Primary MFL Framework at Year 5 and 6.

Creative Use of ICT for Spanish in Year 5 and 6

For notes on how to use Windows Movie Maker, click here.

Tutpup – Maths and English Games

Tutpup is a free online resource for children to play simple maths and English games against other children from all around the world. The beauty of the site is that every child chooses a nickname, based on a colour, animal and number, and therefore remain completely anonymous. A teacher can sign up and create a class code, so that their students only need to enter a minimum of information on the site.

Games currently on the site involve addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra and spelling. There is a Hall of Fame which shows the members who have won the most games over the last 24 hours, 7 days or month, with the leaders having won over 1000 games in the last 30 days! It seems to be a really motivational site for students to practise key skills.

(Thanks to Tom Barrett for pointing me there.)

India Poetry

A year 4 class from Mundella School came to the CLC last week to create multimedia poems based on work written in school about India. We used Photostory to create the poems, which is a free download. The pupils uploaded photos to the program and added text over each one, they could then change the movement of each photo and add transitions. Finally they added music, which they could create within Photostory, to complement their poem. The pupils all really enjoyed using Photostory, as it is easy to use and they liked all the effects. Below are two examples of their poems:

done

done

Online Scrapbook / Yearbook

This may be relevant currently, as students are finishing the year. Scrapblog is a way of creating an online scrapbook or yearbook, using text, images, video and a large number of ready made graphics. You can choose one of their themes, or create one from scratch with your own designs. Addition – to start from scratch you need to buy the stickers, backgrounds etc. There are, however, a large number of themes that are free, and these come with a number of stickers and backgrounds for free, so it is still possible to personalise your scrapblog without paying anything.

We are already planning on working with a year 6 class on creating a virtual yearbook, and this may be the perfect solution for all their memories.

Once you have finished your scrapblog, you can publish it and share it with everyone, or choose to only allow your friends to see it (obviously we stress with young people that the latter is the option they should be choosing). All of this is free, the cost only comes into it if you’d like a printed version. They do three versions, with the cheapest at $9.99. The catch (and it’s a big one) is that the delivery to the UK will cost a whopping $71! Hopefully this will come down as time goes on. However you can download each page as a jpeg (see image below) and you can print these if you want a hard copy.

Click on the image to see our example (as you can see, all my students were photographed at Chatsworth House!):