Beyond the Pier

La Jetée - a work of genius

With a bit of time to go before I get started on teacher training and edublogging proper, I’ve decided to post a bit of an aside which is nevertheless is still somewhat related to languages and learning.

So, why Beyond the Pier as a blog name? A somewhat convoluted story involving World War III, a personal love of French and photography, Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys ,  the joys of translation and not finding the domain name I really wanted.

While studying French at university I happened across La Jetée while looking for some films to watch as an easy and painless way to improve my French.  In a nutshell, it is the story of time travel in Paris  in the aftermath of apocalyptic World War III.  Survivors carry out time travel experiments as a way to try and save the human race.  Sound vaguely familiar?  That’s probably because Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys subsequent film was based upon Chris Marker’s 1962 short film.  I fell in love with the film and after seeing it had a few moments of genuinely stunned silence.  What captivated me, besides the intelligent and thought provoking storyline, was the format: a 28 minutes long, dialogue free, narrated photomontage of exquisite black and white stills. Read more…

Last year I came across an extremely valuable teaching resource website called Teachers.tv.  The UK-based site is regularly updated with content and is nicely laid out.  The site has 3 main areas focusing on videos, classroom resources and community respectively.  Resources are also broken down into in subject and age group Early Years, Primary and Secondary.

There is an active community on Teachers.tv and it is a great point of contact for teachers to share resources, ideas and tips.  There is a lot of good material on Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), especially in relation to ICT.  In time, and over the course of my PGCE, I hope to get to try some of these out in the classroom and report back on the Beyond the Pier.  Here is an example video titled Resource Review – ICT Special: Secondary MFL that typifies Read more…

Having alluded in my first post to linguistic tidbits, I would like to encourage all (especially, but not exclusively, language lovers) to listen to and follow Patrick Cox’s  wonderful radio podcast The World in Words.  It’s punchy, rich, diverse, meaningful, funny, on the pulse and extremely interesting.

“The World in Words focuses on language. We cover everything from bilingual education to the globalization of English to untranslatable foreign phrases. You’ll learn how to insult someone in Icelandic, among other things. Hosted by The World’s Patrick Cox“

You can also read his blog at http://patrickcox.wordpress.com/ and find him on twitter as @patricox

For me this show hits the nail on the head and I find it highly inspirational.  Anything that confirms and awakens my passion for languages is worth its weight in gold.  An uninspired teacher will have a hard time inspiring young minds.

An excellent blogging platform

Welcome to Beyond the Pier. This is a wordpress.org blog  I have set up to gather resources and post thoughts on all things  related to language, education and technology.  I will shortly embark upon teacher training (known as a Postgraduate Certificate of Education or PGCE) in London and I hope to use this space as a way of documenting and sharing my experiences.

With it being a secondary level PGCE in French that I will study, the intention is to focus on how the recent leaps and bounds in technology and web 2.0 can be used to improve and supplement the teaching of languages.  However, I also hope to post more generally on technology in the classroom and how it can be used to facilitate and streamline a teacher’s day-to-day work.  There should also be a sprinkling of tidbits related to, among other things, language, media, cinema and music.

Language itself is sharing

I am a firm believer in the ideology of sharing ideas and resources for the greater and individual good, much like grounding principles of open source software.  With the emergence of web 2.0 and the plethora of social networking, publishing tools and online applications at our fingertips, it has never been easier to be a part of a specific, targeted communication and sharing, irrespective of boundaries.  (Click here for an excellent Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009)

As a result, teachers shouldn’t have to completely reinvent the wheel on a daily basis, especially in terms of tedious or mundane preparation/administration tasks that have been done countless times before.  By letting technology and the sharing of resources take over some of this burden, hopefully teachers should be free to use their time where it is better spent: Read more…