It’s all good, really

 

Image:  Galaxy black space                                                 First week back , term 2, 2015. All good, really. I met my year 9s for the 2 hour double lesson yesterday morning and our  new topic was space. There is soooo much vocabulary to learn for space. Technology makes it easy and I have proof! For space I have made two different slide presentations which I converted to videos. We went through the presentations and we pronounced all the words. I had embedded those videos into a movie with space things and a loose narrative so we went over the vocabulary again. My laptop desktop was a map of Cité de l’espace in Toulouse. I explained what the areas were and then showed them 3 short videos in French about how school children have an excursion to the Toulouse space city and so they could see the real version of what was my desktop background. Some of our vocabulary was used in those videos. I played the slide presentations again to see if they could now tell me what all these words meant. We use Education Perfect for Language learning support. It’s a paid online learning tool and French covers the costs by doing everything electronically. I gave them 30 minutes to learn the space vocabulary there because I had set up the list. It’s divided into 4 ways of learning vocabulary and in the time they were learning so many of them were saying , “Look, I got 100%!” ” Look! I got 80%. That’s good isn’t it?” Some brought their iPads to show me. These students like taking learning risks because they know if they consider it unfair I will negotiate a fall back position if they speak to me about it. 20 mins into their online learning I announced they were having an online test in 5 minutes. Gasp! They ramped up their efforts and watched me set the test. I can do that in 3 minutes and the test came up on their iPads 2 minutes later. They had two chances at each word and 5 minutes to complete the 20 word test. This was the vocabulary we had just learnt that lesson. Education Perfect then emails me the results and notes the words/expressions students had the most difficulty with. All the students got 18 or 19 out of 20. There were four things they were having difficulty with. One student raised the issue they had lost a mark because they had not put a hyphen in. I could see it on his iPad. I have taught them to look out for assessment traps. The point was valid. We listened to two French songs as a break because we are looking at French music for our project this term. One of the songs meant I had to explain the difference between Francophone and French and how you get to be a French national. To finish the lesson we found a conversation in our book and worked with a partner to get the short conversation ready for today. Once I hear those I have a ProVoc presentation/ IWB quiz on the space vocabulary and then we’ll watch a French space cartoon. It’s good with technology. You can really get to work.