Blog Goner?

I played cricket last night (we have a staff team!) and came back home and checked the latest post from several other blogs that I read. Joe Dale's blog featured an interview between himself and David Noble on use of technology, and in particular blogs and podcasts. I was very interested to listen to the interview, and felt that both the questions posed and the answers given were excellent. I was also interested to listen to the various viewpoints on Scottish and English blogs, and how there are more and more cropping up. However there do seem to be a number of blogs that are started up and then are either left to die, or just disappear, and I started to wonder why.

The Northgate blog started up almost a year ago, and to be fair, when we launched it, all the staff in my department were up for it, and were keen to chip and contribute. Eleven months on, and it is now just me, for any number of reasons. Some colleagues felt that getting to grips with the technology outweighed the possible advantages. Some felt under pressure to write things on the blog, whilst others didn't have the time. So as I look back at Northgate MFL, there are a few things that I have personally found challenging -

* Having the time to blog.

That for me is the key thing. As a teacher, especially at certain times of the year like this, most of us are incredibly busy, and sometimes writing your thoughts and opinions on things instead of sorting out Year 11 coursework is not the best plan.

*What to say?

When the Northgate blog started, it was designed to be used by our own students. As we have moved on, I notice that other people from other schools begin to see some of the things we publish. Does that mean that I should cater for those outside of my original intended readership? In a week's time the school magazine comes out with a full page article on the blog, so that finally, the whole community will get a chance to read what it is about. Do I starting think of tailoring my content for parents and possibly local businesses? As yet I haven't. I've tried to keep it focused on the students.

*Finding things to talk about which are relevant.

I have set homework via the blog, uploaded useful resources to help students prepare for exams, offered links to other websites, and articles. We've embedded video so that students can watch relevant stuff from home, all of which has been well received. I'm always desperate to see what other mfl bloggers are doing so that I can learn from their ideas.

Thoughts on Language World 2007

Well now that I've had time to recover, I thought I'd better jot down some things about Language World, the ALL's annual conference. I enjoyed quite a lot this year, and as it's my fourth visit, I would say it has been worthwhile. The venue is probably the best of the ones I've visited, I have to say that Manchester last year wasn't brilliant - especially the room laid aside for lunch, and there seemed to be a few more stalls at the exhibition than last year. I wonder whether anyone actually buys things at these stalls.

Having driven up from Ipswich (or should that be across) at 5.30am, I was ready for some strong coffee, which I got, with jammy dodger accompaniment. Ernesto Macaro's talk was very interesting, and my decision not to take notes was proved foolish when he ran out of hand outs. I'd be grateful if anyone else who was there could scan/email a copy!

I then attended Ewan McIntosh's talk. I saw him at last year's LW, and found him to be very interesting. Having met him in Liverpool back in October, and having had some help from him in setting up the Northgate MFL blog, I was quite keen to listen to him again. I like his style of delivery, and the fact that he makes his presentations very visual. Most stimulating.

Lord Dearing and Dr Lid King were next up on the menu, and it was quite a comforting and reassuring talk. Lord Dearing has put forward some common sense recommendations regarding the future of language teaching, and I think everybody left the room feeling a little more at ease.

After more coffee, and a cheese fest for lunch, I called in to see René Koglbauer's talk on Plenaries. I met René this time last year on a British Council visit to Bavaria, and it was nice to see him again. His plenaries were all very good - he had a PowerPoint nightmare towards the end of the talk - but managed to pull it off well. I do have sympathy with his classes though, who had to trial all of the plenaries to see if they worked!!

To end the day I went to the talk on 'Harnessing Multimedia', run by Fiona Hilton and Richard Henderson, two teachers from the north of England who had been using mobile phones and digital video to motivate students and promote creativity. It's one of those funny things, alluded to in a previous post, as to whether it works or not. The project was supported by CILT, and both school's seemed to rate the outcome. On a positive note, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the end results, but I have difficulty seeing how that could work in my school. I will still have fun trying to investigate the possibilities.

The conference dinner was the usual schmooze fest, seeing friendly faces and meeting new ones. The belly dancing was a novel feature, and I'll leave it at that.

Saturday was a technology day, with visits to the E-Creativity in Language Learning seminar, followed by a trip to see SoccerLingua. The e-creativity seminar follwed nicely in the footsteps of the harnessing multimedia talk from Friday, and it does show that video, used effectively, can serve as a motivational tool for students. SoccerLingua, on the other hand, didn't overly impress me due to the relatively short life span that the materials have.

I then ended my stay in Oxord by taking in Joe Dale's 'Death by PowerPoint' presentation. For me, this was a refresher course in the joys of using PowerPoint. Joe talks very well, and did well to race through his talk in the alloted time. Joe, like Ewan is someone I first came across at last year's LW, and he has proved to be a great help for us with the blogging and podcasting.

Why don't you let me know what you though of this years Language World?

Why do we do this?

Since the Northgate MFL blog was created back in June, we've been trying to find ways to harness new and evolving technologies to help students, and to provide greater motivation in learning MFL at our school. We've gone from what are now simple things like exchanging emails with students, to using the blog to upload and store resources for students to download. This year we've produced podcasts and mp3 recordings, conducted online projects like the Gifted and Talented, used Wikispaces to develop groupwork online, and have used mobile phones to record sound and images to share work. The question I have to ask myself is whether it is actually worth it. I tried a couple of times with the mobile phone in lessons, and initially the kids were too preoccupied with actually using the phone as opposed to what we were using it for, but eventually we got the students to Bluetooth their files to my Mac which was linked up to the data projector - a good bit of peer assessment. The podcasting and MP3 recording has really worked well, the students love doing that, and enjoy the recording experience much more than I gave them credit for. So as far as I am concerned it has been totally worth it.

I'm fortunate that I work in a very forward thinking specialist language college, where most of the staff are keen to give things a go. But when I attend conferences and talks given by people like Joe Dale and Ewan McIntosh, both of whom have proved to be a great help and sounding board in getting the school blog going, I can't help but feeling that I am still in a minority. Many teachers I speak to in the East of England love the concept of starting a blog, or making a podcast, but are either too apprehensive to give it a go, don't have the time due to other pressing workloads, or just don't think it will work. There are also too many for my liking who are, for want of a better word 'scared' of the the fact that they feel that thewy can't dare to leave the text book or syllabus. I for one can understand this to a certain extent - I'm caught between the need to motivate my students, to show them how much fun languages can be, and the need to cover everything in the course in the limited time available. For those of you who have taught AS and A2, you should be able to empathise with me. Some teachers look at me like I'm mad when I talk about using mobiles to send kids' work to each other, and I know that they think that I should have covered that really important gap-fill on page 32.

How do I get them to change their minds?