PiE Blog

Communicate.06

What a day! It all started last night when I arrived in Stirling accompanied by my colleagues Kay, Vivien and Lynne, and seven students representing the various schools in the PiE project. PiE has been involved in the preparation of the Scottish CILT and LT Scotland. In the early stages of planning I had suggested that we could use a group of students to work as a media team and make a record of the conference.

All the students had previously taken part in our film-making activities and were confident using the camera and carrying out interviews. We did some extra training with the students, particularly on the techniques involved in podcasting, and by the Saturday morning they had their shooting plan, their storyboards and their camera batteris fully charged!

Throughout the day the students filmed interviews with various speakers and participants. They also recorded interviews on iRiver mp3 players which will ultimately be edited (hopefully by Ewan!) into podcasts.

See the PiE site for more information on the input of PiE staff on the day in terms of presentations.

We had a fairly hectic afternoon trying to edit together the final movie. Nevertheless we made our deadline and during the final plenary session the movie was shown to the conference participants. The students did brilliantly, and we hope to publish the movie on the PiE website very soon.

ブラインドデト with Sira-san

A first tonight for PiE: we've extended our film-making activities to include Japanese. Over the course of the past year we've been developing Japanese as you may have read in earlier blog entries. We've been doing film-making activities for 6 years now and although we weren't able to run a full Japanese film-making weekend this year, we're delighted to have brought together 12 students who are currently studying Japanese at our after school classes to make their own version of ブラインドデト, otherwise known as "buraindo deto", with Kilmarnock's very own "sira-san"!

The filming went very well, although we only managed to get half of the film finished tonight. It will be shown at the Film Festival along with all our French, German and Spanish films, although because of the way in which our Japanese film has been produced it won't be part of the official competition.

Why "Blind date"?
I was a bit concerned that the students wouldn't know enough Japanese to be able to cope with a whole film, but that's why we chose Blind Date. The good thing about this topic is that it basically involves someone asking questions of other people, and the questions can be as straightforward as you need them! After the usual "what's your name and where do you come from?", we concentrated on questions which allowed our students to practise what they'd been learning, including pastimes, likes and dislikes, etc. It all seemed to go quite well!

Podcasting i Norge

The podcasting work of PiE was recognised recently when Ranvik Ungdomskole in Sandefjord, Norway, invited Mark Pentleton, Project Coordinator, to lead a group of students from across Europe in a podcasting project linked to their International Youth Conference.

Over the three days of the conference, Mark worked with students from Scotland, Norway, Italy, Germany and Latvia to produce two podcasts about the events of the conference. You can listen to the programmes by clicking here. QuickTime required.

PiE Roadshow underway

Each year the PiE team travel around the schools involved in the project to provide information about language-learning to students as they are about to make their subject choices for S5. We've made available the special website for students which can be found here.