Beyond the Pier

Typical story: a blog starts of well with enthusiasm and then life (more specifically a busy PGCE schedule) gets in the way.  A bit of a re-think means I’ll plan to post shorter posts and focus especially on useful resources and links.

With this in mind, I’d like to draw attention to the fact that free tickets are available for the Languages Show 2009 in London’s Olympia on the 30th Oct – 1st Nov.  Simply register for free via their website and print out your tickets.

The show is ” For language learners,l anguage teachers, linguists and everyone who loves language”and features seminars,  exhibitors, intensive and taster language courses and much more besides.  It is sure to be a valuable and inspirational event for anyone with a passion for, or working with language.

Another useful organisation for language teachers, and a sponsor of The Language Show, is ALL – The Assossciation for Language Learning.  Check out their program for lots of interesting and useful events.

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…

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…