PiE Blog

Revision materials for Higher exams

Coming this week is the first in a series of revision materials for the Higher exams: a series of three podcasts taking each aspect of the Higher French exam in turn and discussing the best ways to tackle the papers. We've been working with the SQA to produce these podcasts and hope that the final products will be useful to staff and students throughout Scotland. Due to copyright issues, the podcasts will be restricted to use in Scottish schools. For this reason I'll be posting the details on the MFLE discussion board as soon as they're available.

Virtual Mandarin

Not quite sure where this fits, but I thought it's worth a mention. I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while now and I've finally done something about it today. I've set myself a challenge of learning a language using online resources only. I'm going to have a go at learning Mandarin Chinese by using materials, podcasts, pdfs, and anything else I can lay my hands on (virtually!) from the web. I'll be keeping a blog about my progress, but readers can also link to the resources I find from the blog and learn along with me. Why Mandarin? Why online resources? Why now? Well, I've tried to explain things over on the Virtual Mandarin blog. Subscribe, leave a comment and join with me in learning Mandarin!

PiECast taster edition

We've uploaded a taster edition of the PiECast, just to outline some of the materials which will soon be available. These include listening practice materials in the run up to the exams, and language courses which will be available later in the summer. You can access the PiECast in iTunes by clicking here.

VERBcast is back

I've just realised that I forgot to update the PiE blog with the news that the VERBcast is back. Since Wednesday of last week, daily programmes are being released on the special VERBcast blog - local students have also signed up for the updates by text message. The programmes are available publically, and everyone is welcome to test their knowledge by posting comments on the blog.

'Adapt or die' - Herald article causes some controversy

This morning's article in the Herald on the digital future of language-learning in Scotland is already causing a fair amount of discussion. The article suggests that languages are in crisis in Scotland, something which we are told is not the case by HMI. It also refers to the fact that the "Scottish Executive made [languages] voluntary": not exactly the case, as Dick Johnstone reminded us recently at the Royal Society of Edinburgh conference.

The article does list some of the exciting things happening in languages teaching in Scotland, including good mention of what we're doing in PiE. There is a quote from one of our students, and even a couple of photos taken by our very own Brian Green. I've uploaded a copy of the article to our server - hope that's ok with the Herald! Feel free to post your thoughts, and you can join in the discussion on Ewan's blog.

Major website update

Over the past few days I've finally got round to updating the PiE website with new stories and photos from the past few months. Things have been so busy since Christmas with lots of activities, visits and conferences, and it's been really difficult to keep up to date. There are now articles on pretty much everything we've done in PiE since Christmas:

The Times Ed review of the VerbCast
Paris Visit
S4 Film-making weekend
S4 Roadshow
Euroscola blog
Strasbourg visit
Norwegian Youth Conference podcasting
Japanese film-making
Scottish CILT: Communicate.06 Conference
Royal Society of Edinburgh Conference
German and Spanish film-making weekend
Sandefjord Film Festival
Language World Conference

And perhaps the biggest announcement of them all - the launch of the new PiE Movie Theatre where we'll be posting lots of movie content from PiE over the coming months.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep everything up to date a bit more regularly now!