ICT Training for Teachers
Modern Foreign Languages -
Planning and assessing ICT in MFL
- Introduction
- We hope that by now you are becoming keenly
interested in the use of ICT in your MFL lessons, and perhaps
even already a keen user of ICT in your lessons. As you gain
experience, you will soon realise that you should not be working
with ICT on an ad hoc basis, and that some form of planning and
evaluation will become necessary. Eventually you will need to
consider the use of ICT across the whole department, and in turn
across the whole school.
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- Departmental and whole
school issues
- When considering departmental issues for
ICT we must bear in mind that teachers do not teach their subjects
in a vacuum. Meeting the various national requirements for the
curriculum in England and Wales, in Scotland and in Northern
Ireland, will place constraints on what is taught and the order
in which it is taught. The MFL department will draw up more or
less detailed schemes of work which will lay out the framework
within which the subject is taught. These schemes will specify
matters such as the topics to be covered, and how to ensure progression.
ICT should be an integral part of these schemes, and not a bolt-on
extra.
- A departmental scheme of work which includes
ICT should cover two distinct but closely related issues:
- curriculum issues and
- organisational issues.
- Curriculum issues include those of balance
and progression:
- Where will the ICT work best be used to
complement and extend the learning opportunities?
- How will the ICT activities be built into
the schemes of work?
- How will all the MFL staff ensure progression
in ICT capability?
- How will staff guard against an over-emphasis
on ICT at the expense of MFL learning?
- Which activities and applications will
be used at which stages of the curriculum?
- What topic areas or project work will
be covered at the various stages of the course?
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- Organisational issues will relate the
curriculum issues to what is feasible in the school. Schools
where there is an MFL departmental ICT suite, or perhaps a cluster
of networked machines in one room, will need a rather different
policy from those where there are only stand-alone machines,
or where all ICT activities take place in an ICT room which is
shared with the rest of the school. Additional points to cover
could include:
- Who will be responsible for purchasing
new software?
- How will new software be introduced to
the pupils?
- Which software should be used with which
pupils/year groups?
- How will original software be kept secure?
- What is the policy on backing up software
and pupil files?
- How can banks of prepared files used by
different teachers be pooled?
- Where will prompt sheets, guides and help
sheets be kept?
- What is the policy for pupil access to
the equipment?
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- Constructing an MFL departmental ICT policy
is a new area for most teachers, but there is help and guidance
available on the Internet at the various sites devoted to language
teaching and learning. The Virtual Teacher Centre has a site
to support MFL IT issues (we have used this site several times
already) which has some useful training activities to help departments
draw up an ICT policy.
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Activity
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Task 13
Have a look at the Training Activities on the
VTC, and think about how you would adopt or adapt the ideas given
on the VTC and in this module to construct your own Departmental ICT
Policy.
You can find your way to the Training Activities
by clicking on the 1st link below and then working your way through
the MFL pages to 'ICT in the Curriculum' and on to 'Managing
ICT' where you will find the 'Training Activities'; or you can
straight to the appropriate page by clicking on the 2nd link.
- http://curriculum.becta.org.uk/
- http://curriculum.becta.org.uk/docserver.php?temid=300
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Discussion
You should start thinking about whole-school
issues and pupil entitlement. Is your department doing its fair
share for ICT across the curriculum? Can you turn this requirement
to your advantage? The VTC MFL IT site gives plenty of stimulus
and support for these ideas.
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- Your own planning
for ICT
Classroom organisation
We have dealt at some length with some of
the armoury of ICT tools available to the modern languages teacher.
We shall now consider those issues of classroom organisation which
will help us decide which of these tools will be employed at any
particular time.
A number of considerations will be going
through your mind when planning a lesson. It will not be enough
to justify the use of ICT in a lesson because we happen to have
a good idea for using ICT: we need to plan how to integrate the
ICT into the lesson plan so that its use arises from good practice
rather than as a bolt-on additional idea. Here are some reasons
why I might choose to use ICT in a particular lesson (and perhaps
some of the thoughts which follow could stimulate further plans
and ideas):
- I know that the use of ICT can certainly motivate pupils,
but I shall use it because it is also very effective in getting pupils to
concentrate on accuracy.
- Text manipulation exercises are easy to set up using
a text manipulation program such as Fun With Texts, and they encourage skills
of ordering and predicting. The exercises have also been chosen to suit a
wide range of ability.
- I shall use a combination of text manipulation and matching
exercises and get the pupils to write down their scores at the end of each
exercise.
- I am not using word processing merely because the results
looks neat and tidy, but because its use can enhance language acquisition.
- I shall get the pupils to word process their stories
because I want them to be able to add details in a later lesson, and to improve
on their work after I have checked it. It will also give ICT-adept pupils
a chance to develop their skills further, while keeping the work relevant
to the topic.
- We will word process this exercise, making use of the
electronic dictionaries: this should focus the pupils on the task, and lead
to even greater accuracy.
- I shall get the pupils to construct a poster using a
desk-top-publishing program (such as Publisher). I shall do this, not merely
for the pleasing result of the final presentation, but because greater accuracy
is possible, and I can give the pupils word banks to stimulate more ideas.
- My aim is that by illustrating their work with graphics
the pupils will think more deeply about the words they are writing, and the
graphics will make the words more memorable. It will also give ICT-adept pupils
a chance to develop their skills further, while keeping the work relevant
to the topic.
- I shall use the CD-ROM foreign language encyclopaedia
to give the pupils an alternative route through to learning about this topic.
This should also help in their skills of reading for gist and understanding.
- The basic language CD-ROM (for example: Vektor French
Expressions, SIR Global French) has been chosen because the pupils can listen
to each word and phrase as often as they wish, without holding up the rest
of the class. If they get completely stuck they can click on the English translation.
- I have chosen this program (for example: the Vektor Language
Library) because it encourages independent learning, remembers where the pupils
have got to, and stores details of their progress for me to monitor as well
as providing the pupils with feedback and motivation.
- I have chosen this reading package (for example: Autolire,
CD-Lesen) because it has an on-line dictionary which is context-sensitive,
and it provides well-targeted grammar and comprehension exercises.
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Activity
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Task 14
See if you can add to this list!
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For any given lesson you could use a number of these ideas,
and over the years a Modern Languages department can gather a very large bank
of ready-made ICT resources. For instance, for a series of German lessons covering
hobbies you might have available the following ICT resources:
- Fun With Texts exercises
- Matchmaster exercises
- Gapmaster exercises
- Six German Games
- Unterwegs
- CD-Lesen
- ideas for a hobby poster using Publisher (or a similar
program)
- a collection of e-mail letters from the partner school
- hints on how to do a class survey
- hints on how to enter data into a database or spreadsheet
- saved Internet pages from a German tourist office
- Internet addresses for German catalogues
- suggestions for word processing
- suggestions for desk-top-publishing
etc.
Discussion
There is no way that you should use all of
the well over 10 different approaches available - this would swamp
the language learning with ICT. How many do you think you could
manage? How would you use your choice to allow for differentiation
according to the abilities of the pupils in the class. Some of
the easier tasks will come in the earlier stages of the lessons,
but your aim should be that as many pupils as possible will be
producing original German (text, speech) based on the topic of
hobbies.
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Activity
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Task 15
Draw up a list of possible activities to support
a particular area of your language teaching, and construct a lesson
plan which makes use of two or three balanced ICT tasks. Try it
out!
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Sample Lesson Plan
We give here a link to a sample lesson plan for pupils
to write a film review. This was originally designed
for a KS4 group, but could be adapted and simplified for a younger group.
Try it out, or adapt it for your own class.
Discussion
Does this sample lesson plan reflect your
approach to lesson planning?
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Assessing the use of ICT in MFL
Teaching
We devote the whole of the next
section to the Evaluation of how MFL has been enhanced by the use of ICT.
Here we shall concentrate on how to assess the use of ICT in the MFL lesson.
You should begin by looking through the materials on Planning
and Assessing ICT in Module 5 of the Primary Core. When you reach Task 12
you should return here for the Activity.
Activity
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Task 16
Review any lesson in which you have used ICT and
think about how you can apply the Assessment ideas which you have
just studied.
- What kind of assessment would be valid for
that activity?
Can you reach an opinion about the ICT level that
they pupils were working at? (You may need to talk to your ICT co-ordinator.)
Write a brief summary of the lesson, with particular
reference to the ICT component, and your assessment of the quality
of the ICT work. If possible, give your assessment of the ICT level
that the pupils are working at.
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