Institution: Brinsworth School

Context
Brinsworth School in Rotherham is a mixed 11-18 comprehensive of 1400+ students. The school is a Specialist Science College. The languages taught are French, German and Spanish. The MFL Department makes regular visits to France and Germany.

How the programme is organised
Enabling a Year 10 GCSE French group of 26 students to use authoring software to create a sequence of multimedia interactive materials in order to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of language and to deepen their understanding of the process of learning languages.

Students progressed from initial whole-class activities on the interactive whiteboard to investigation of selected websites for extra vocabulary, useful phrases and data.
They then prepared a range of interactive materials using authoring software. In addition to text they used digital photos and audio and video recordings, often from mobile phones. The exercises ranged from word-matching to text reconstruction.

They incorporated their videos and audio work into comic style PowerPoint presentations on the chosen themes within the topic of healthy living.

Students demonstrated their final products for peer evaluation.

Key objectives

• Enable students to produce a set  of interactive materials, incorporating audio, video and digital images, in order to consolidate learning and demonstrate language competence
• Enable students to progress to freer more creative work
• Promote independent learning in students
• Develop different learning styles by using multimedia
• Develop technical, critical and creative skills

How activities are organised
The teacher explained the project to the students: its rationale, the role the students would play and the outcome. Students were familiar with interactive exercises produced with authoring software, in this case Task Magic, so the prospect of creating their own interactive activities excited them, while the use of audio or video was appealing. In order to consolidate grammar of relevance to the project, text books and the interactive whiteboard were used to go over constructions such as the Imperfect tense and Il faut + infinitive. Groups were formed, each one to deal with a sub-topic such as diet, or exercise.Resource booklets were prepared so that each pupil would have access to relevant vocabulary, examples and models and some reading exercises.

Having covered the necessary grammar and key vocabulary, the groups then proceeded to work on their projects. The pattern was adopted of alternating between planning in class and working in the computer suite. The teacher showed students how to create interactive exercises and then supported individual groups and students as they worked on their resource creation and their presentation for the end of the project. Such was the enthusiasm of students that many of them worked outside of class, researching the topic and relevant language on the Internet. They often used their mobile phones to make short video clips. The students stored all work completed outside of school on CD or a Flash Memory drive and then transferred resources to the school network. In the final week they concentrated on their comic style PowerPoint presentations. The end products were of a high standard and a testimony to the efforts and commitment of the students.

Evidence of success

• Students developed a range of skills: linguistic, collaborative, investigative, and technical.
• They developed independence and different approaches to learning, using a range of technology and media.
• Students grouped themselves according to shared interests, and so played to their strengths, linguistic or in relation to the topic. Stronger members of the group were willing to help weaker members and so a support framework existed within each group.
• Students maintained focus throughout. They had a sense of ownership of their learning and this helped sustain momentum.
• Some students showed their friends from other classes how to create interactive activities which led other students to create learning materials.

Next steps

• Adopt this approach with a Year 10 class going on an exchange trip to France and with Year 11 students preparing for their GCSE oral presentation.
• Develop the use of video and video editing software.