I am pleased to report Modern Language staff at Dalziel High School are now looking to use  blogs in the coming session.  Staff have signed up and have selected designs.  Will provide links to them when they are up and running.  Next week I hope to be helping staff in Coltness High to get started as well!  Want to know more?  See the QDS catalogue and sign up for the ICT inset where the afternoon will be devoted to hands-on ICT support for Blogs, MP3 players and podcasts.

Here are some of the ways Edublogs suggest you can use a blog to support Learning and Teaching.  More importantly it may just engage some of our disengaged young people!

CD1 for all four languages has now been uploaded.  Weekly statistical information indicates that downloads have gone to the Glasgow area as well as Birmingham, Manchester and Prague!  Somebody out there obviously found the sound files useful.  Feel free to direct your pupils to the podcast site.

Have now stored two podcasts with podomatic and inserted the link onto the blog.  Try it out and let me know what you think!  With a bit of time and effort I could probably do the same for German, Italian and Spanish.

By now you will have realised that you are unable to download the audio files or podcasts previously published.  I have been speaking to and e-mailing people across the country on this issue and hope to find a solution.  For now it is easy to upload a podcast for listening to, it just can’t be downloaded.

Have also had some encouraging e-mails on the immediate impact of the MP3 players.  Please be in touch if you require any support.

Greetings and IntroductionsToday I have managed to rip one of the Primary French Cds and converted the files to MP3 format.  I have now uploaded the first of the files which could be used for homework.  Pupils would download the file and listen to it.  Would also be useful for absentees to catch up on work they had missed.

First Podcast

First podcast is being uploaded with this post.   Let me know if it works!  Try to download it to your computer or MP3 player.  This proved to be a bit of a task as I was blocked by the Webmarshall at NLC.  It appears that I will only be able to upload an MP3 file and not a wav file.  No need for you to worry about this.  I have now tried to upload at home without a problem.

If you look at the right hand side of the page you will see a section called BLOGROLL.  This is where you can leave links to frequently accessed websites which you and your pupils may find useful.  Another way to direct pupils to a particular site is to create a tag in the text.  So if you were writing about the SQA you would highlight the text then create a link by adding the URL.  This is particularly useful if you wish to direct pupils to a site which you have previously checked for suitability.  Let’s assume you were researching the Berlin Wall.  Google will give you 580 000 sites to search in under 2 seconds but you could direct the pupils to the site you wanted by creating a link in the text as I have done.  When you highlight the text, the create a link symbol becomes active on the taskbar and then you just copy and paste the URL into the pop up window and that’s it done.   Now you could direct the pupils to Checkpoint Charlie as the next part of their research.

We have now discovered two ways of directing visitors to your blog to other sites either by adding a link to the Blogroll or inserting a link into the text of your blog.

Here are a few more links:

Goethe Institut

Alliance Francaise

Welcome to the new North Lanarkshire Modern Languages Support Blog!  This blog has been set up to demonstrate to Principal Teachers of Modern Languages throughout the authority how teachers could use a blog to engage pupils in learning a Modern Language.

Teachers will be able to leave homework tasks online for pupils to access either from a computer in school or at home.

If you want some support to set up your own blog send me an e-mail at; dalzellr@northlan.gov.uk

Or leave a comment!