PiE Blog

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!

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!

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.

Au carrefour de l'Europe :: At the crossroads of Europe

During the past week a group fo 45 students from PiE schools has travelled to the heart of Europe for a week of French language immersion. Throughout the week, parents, family, friends, teachers and classmates followed the Strasbourg blog, a daily report from the city featuring photos and stories about what the group was doing each day of the visit. We're delighted to report that the blog scored well over 10,000 hits during the week, and a record number of messages was received from back home during the visit - parents, family and friends sent no fewer than 599 messages while we were out in Strasbourg.

Possibilitats de treballar junts amb Barcelona

The work of the PiE project was shared with educationalists from the Centre de Recursos de Llengües Estrangeres today with a view to drawing up a plan for a future joint project. North Ayrshire has excellent links with the CRLE and John Travers, Director of Education, joined the PiE Project Coordinator in the discussions which focused on drawing up a proposal for a Comenius 2.1 project.

VerbCast gets review in Times Ed

This morning's TES features an article on the VerbCast and the success we've had with the programme. Here's an update for those of you coming to us having read the article. We're about to launch a second run of the VerbCast with two focus groups in two different schools. They'll be pretested and post-tested in an attempt to identify how much they learn via the project and we've been developing our text-messaging in a big way to help with this new run of the podcast.

If you're interested in finding out more about PiE and our use of podcasts in languages education then make sure you check out the PiECast, which can be accessed from this article.

Please note that if you would like to subscribe to the VerbCast you can do so by copying and pasting the following address into the dialog box in iTunes: http://feeds.feedburner.com/verbcasthi

PiECast "recommended"!

The PiECast has been reviewed in a new book called Podcasting: The ultimate starter kit. Here's the review: "The PiECast is one of the best out there for the main European languages. PiE (Partners in Excellence) is a really great initiative which regularly uploads language learning podcasts for students of German, French and Spanish. It's intended to be for schools (though it has plenty to offer anyone learning the languages) so it has an eye on the exam season with appropriate listening exercises posted in time for the aurals. Best of all it aims to catch the attention of those of us who hated traditional language learning and spent most of our time throwing things at the back of the class. Recommended."

There will be more from the PiECast very soon!