PiE Blog

Animation Weekend Update

This weekend a group of 17 students from different schools involved in the PiE project have been making animated films in French and German. We started on Friday afternoon with some preparation activities. The students were introduced to the concept of animation through examples and discussion. We saw previous animated films which have been created on other PiE activities including our summer schools in 2004 and 2005. The students then started working on their plots and scripts.

An early rise on Saturday meant that we were able to get straight into the animation itself. Even before breakfast some of the students were working on their sets. The students have worked in three groups: we have an animal version of Star Academy, a report live from a celebrity party attended by Barbie, among others, and a Bob the Builder multilingual love story! We've been used to animating in the past with plasticine, and using toys has been quite a challenge in some ways. The biggest challenge seems to have been making Barbie stand up! This was solved by creating "concrete boots" out of plasticine!

Today we're adding the voiceovers and refining the movies. The animated sequences were created on a laptop using Boinx Software's iStopMotion and then imported into iMovie for adding voiceovers and titles. Later today we'll all watch the completed movies.

It's been a great weekend - there are a few more photos on the official PiE site - and we think the students have had a great time. They've worked together extremely well throughout the weekend.

Strasbourg visit dates announced

We've finally been able to confirm our dates for the visit to Strasbourg in February 2006. We'll be travelling to Strasbourg on Tuesday 21st February in the evening from Prestwick to Frankfurt Hahn, and returning on Tuesday 28th February, again in the evening. Further discussion can be found here (for LanguageZone users only).

Podcast Alley listing for VerbCast

Just to let everyone know that the VerbCast is now featured at PodCast Alley and you can, of course, now vote for the VerbCast! We appreciate all votes, and in particular we are grateful for any comments you may wish to share!

To vote for the VerbCast, visit Podcast Alley and click on the "Vote Now" link. You'll have to confirm your vote via a link in an email.

Merci d'avance!

VerbCast - complete series now available

It's official: the VerbCast is finally complete. All 20 programmes are now available on the iTunes Music Store. You can access the entire series in iTunes by clicking here.

The VerbCast covers all regular and 20 common irregular verbs in the present, perfect, imperfect and future tenses and uses innovative relaxation and visualisation techniques. The VerbCast was piloted by a group of students from various PiE schools. The students listened to daily episodes of the VerbCast and completed activities and assignments using the latest text messaging technologies.

Thanks to everyone who got involved with the VerbCast. If you were involved in the pilot programmes, post your comments here. Remember you can also vote for the VerbCast on Podcast Alley (though I'm still waiting for that to filter through!) I'll update as soon as I know anything.

For anyone who doesn't have broadband, there's a lower quality version available too.

Apple does it again (again)

No doubt this has less interest for the general public than the release of the Video iPod, but the latest announcement from Apple, their new pro image editing and organisation tool "Aperture" is going to make a huge difference to how we deal with the thousands of photos we take on all our activities. It's iPhoto on steroids or Final Cut Pro for stills photographers and looks to be a major player in the field of image organisation tools, knocking Portfolio and iView Media (our current preferred choice) firmly out of the way.

Read more at the Apple website and watch some very enticing walkthroughs. I particularly like the custom web and book publishing - would take a fair amount of time out of the current uploading to web of the photos we take. And it would also allow me to do something I've been wanting to do for ages - put the entire PiE photo library online. Five years of PiE... that's over 17,000 photos - and counting!

Using Japanese on a PC

I've copied this from the LanguageZone website  because I thought it may be useful to other people.  どうも　ありがとう to Lesley and Brian who helped out as we tried to sort this out!

You first of all need to go the XP Japanese download site  where you can find the Office XP Japanese language pack. By installing this, then restarting your computer, you should find that you can now read the Japanese on these pages. You should also be able to read Japanese on MSN convos etc.

However, in order to *write* in Japanese on here, I think you need to install something else: the Global IME for Japanese can be found here  and if you follow all the instructions on that page you should be able to write in Japanese.

It's soooo cool using it on your computer - next week at class I'll show you how it works. You basically switch on Japanese input and as you type, eg "watashi", each syllable (mora) comes up. So I'd type w-a and I'd be given わ immediately. As I continue to type t-a I get た and as I type s-h-i I get し. Now comes the really cool bit. Having typed "watashi", I have three moras of hiragana: わたし. But if I press the space bar, it presents me with the possible kanji writings of that combination of sounds. These include 私、渡し, among others. If I know my kanji (it always helps...) then I know that the first one it showed me is the correct kanji for "watashi" meaning "I", so I accept it by pressing the return key. That, at least is how it works on a Mac. I assume it's something similar on a PC. I have a meeting later today during which I should be able to find out a bit more, or at least try the PC version.

がんばって！

A new PiE classic?

I was asked recently what the difference between the main PiE site and the blog is. Maybe this is the perfect example - I'd never have posted this on the main PiE site!!! I've just bought Madonna's latest single Hung up from the iTMS. Classic pop song, but couldn't believe it when I heard the samples of Gimme Gimme Gimme in there! Abba are known for never letting their music be sampled. Here are some comments from Benny Andersson:

Andersson said recently: "We get so many requests from people wanting to use our tracks but we normally say no. This is only the second time we have given permission. We said yes this time because we admire Madonna so much and always have done. She has got guts and has been around for 21 years. That is not bad going. If it wasn`t any good we wouldn`t have said yes. It is a wonderful track, 100% solid pop music." [Link to original]

Hung up will be featured at a PiE party near you...

Sunday Express - nothing again

Yet again, nothing in this week's Sunday Express. Two of our students were interviewed last week in preparation for an article which apparently appeared in the first edition down south. It does make me wonder if there had been some negative story about PiE or anything related, would that have got more coverage than the "good news" story about the VerbCast?

Apple does it again: new video iPod

Warning: this has nothing to do with languages directly. But it's cool! They've done it again. After the recent European Expo in Paris a few people were disappointed that the only thing to come out of the launch of new products was the iPod Nano. OK, so the Nano is very cool. But the Apple press release came a few weeks later. Steve Jobs claimed there was "just one more thing..." and this one more thing was launched yesterday: the new video iPod.

OK, so I know that there are loads of video-enabled mp3 players out there. But people just seem to find the iPod cooler than than the majority of other mp3 players. And now that the iPod does video there's no stopping it! It's intrinsically linked to the iTunes Music Store, from which you can now download music videos, episodes of your favourite TV shows and even films. All of which will sync to your iPod for you to watch on the move. The iPod also can connect to your tv to let you watch your movies etc on there.

The other announcement which came last night was the new iMac. This features a built in iSight webcam for video conferencing and other applications, and the new Front Row software which turns your Mac into a media centre giving you access to your music, photos, videos, podcasts and cool things like online movie trailers all from your Mac, full screen. The iMac now also comes with a remote control. If you combine all this with something like the El Gato eyeTV then who needs a boring old tv anymore!?

So what about the educational applications of all this, and how will we put it to use in PiE? Well, the 75 hours of video that you can squeeze onto a new iPod may just and no more allow us to put the entire video library from all our weekends and trips onto one iPod. We'll no doubt be heading down the road of video podcasts at some point in the future, and with built-in iSights and QuickTime Pro software in new iMacs recording a video podcast couldn't be easier!

So I'm officially realigning my desires from the iPod nano to the new video iPod. Christmas list here we come...

MFLE Image Upload

Anyone reading this is likely to be familiar with the MFLE, Scotland's new national website aimed at language teachers. Among lots of other brilliant resources, the MFLE is offering to collate and distribute images which have been snapped by languages teachers while on holiday. A great idea.

There's been a fair bit of talk on the MFLE Discussion board about how best to get these images to the staff there - email seems to be proving difficult. This morning I've offered a solution - I've altered Image Upload script for LanguageZone and PiE websites to allow people to upload images to our servers which can then be accessed by Ewan and his colleagues. It will hopefully offer a quick solution while the MFLE is developing their own process. Hope it's of use!