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2nd School Visit for Routes into Languages Project
Last week’s visit to Trinity Catholic High School in Woodford to teach year 8 students Digital Storytelling was very successful. The students showed great enthusiasm for the project and seemed to grasp the concept of the digital story very well. A theme of “My School” was chosen for the French group so their teacher could send the stories to their exchange school in Bordeaux. The Spanish group could be a bit more creative with the theme “My Holiday”; groups created stories about a previous holiday or a dream trip; some chosing unusual destinations such as the moon.. very imaginative!
Improved Preparation and Materials
This time we had more language materials prepared, including a handout of useful phrases in French and Spanish. Through liaising with the teachers before the workshop we could assess the level of the students and ensure that they would cover the chosen themes; as a result they were already familiar with the language and vocabulary. The students had in fact been picked for their language ability; they had not yet chosen their GCSEs and their teachers were keen to encourage them to take up languages by involving them in innovative activities such as this.
Language Supervision
Despite my rusty French I was able to help correct the students’ scripts; only one French teacher was available. The afternoon’s Spanish group was well catered for with myself and two Spanish teachers on hand to correct scripts before recording began. Most of the students were very willing to write everything in the target language and seemed to enjoy recording their voices. I was particularly impressed by their level, in particular the Spanish group’s accents.
The above slideshow has some screen shots from the students’ stories.
I’ll let the students say the rest: (quotes from their feedback forms)
Londres, espacio urbano. Camden Town from Spanish in Motion on Vimeo.
Since changing the focus of our Digital Storytelling workshops, we have had several requests to deliver them in secondary schools around London. This workshop was originally designed to be delivered to teachers but we are now delivering it directly to pupils. Here at the LSE Language Centre, Digital Storytelling forms part of the assessed coursework for our French and Spanish Degree students.
Our first school visit was on 22nd March when myself and a colleague visited Dormers High School in Southall and delivered a workshop to two groups of Year 9 students. These visits are part of the Routes into Languages project, which is a consortium of universities which aims to promote the take up of languages in schools.
After our introduction and demonstration the students got straight on with the task of creating their own digital stories, with both of us on hand to supervise and monitor the groups. Despite only a couple of students having previous experience of the program (Movie Maker) most were able to use it with minimal supervision; it was the story structure they needed most support with. As always there were some technical issues but both workshops went very well; perhaps the second was smoother as we could adjust the structure and solve the technical hitches in light of the first session. Each session ended with a showcase of the students’ digital stories.
Feedback from the teachers was good; one suggestion was to have extra support and materials on the language side as students need more help with this and less with the technology, something we we will bear in mind for future sessions. The programme will continue in the summer term so we plan to develop and improve the format with the next workshop scheduled for 16th May.
In case you are wondering what a digital story looks like, above is an example made by one of our Spanish Degree students.
Language Log 