Institution: Northgate High School

Northgate High School is one of the largest 11-19 schools in Ipswich with around 1700 on roll and offers a wide range of AS, A2 and GCSE courses in French, German and Spanish. The MFL department of 12 colleagues has been using their MFL@Northgate blog for the last two years in order to showcase pupils' work, facilitate real contacts with schools and young people in other countries, stimulate creativity and develop ways of working interactively and collaboratively. There is a variety of trips abroad including a sixth form exchange with a school in St Etienne and a Year 8 visit to Koblenz in Germany.

Project
Making use of blogging in the MFL classroom to reinvigorate language learning and inspire students.

Key objectives

• To stimulate creativity
• To showcase students' written and spoken work
• To record events on school trips by blogging with a mobile phone (moblogging)
• To facilitate real contacts with schools and young people in other countries
• To develop ways of working interactively and collaboratively
• To enable students to publish for a real purpose to a real audience
• To offer peer assessment opportunities and enable students to voice their opinions
• To develop distance learning opportunities so that students can become more independent
• To engage students with technology which is already familiar to them and make language learning more relevant to them
• To set up international podcasting and blogging links with partner schools in France and Germany
• To put into practice recommendations in the Dearing Languages Review of March 2007

How activities are organised

• Year 12 students peer assess an essay written by another class member and suggest ways in which it could be improved. They share thoughts as to what was good about the work and take ideas away for their essays.
• Homework is published on the blog for students to download and complete
• Tasks are indexed or 'tagged' according to year group or topic so they can be found easily
• Resources are shared with other schools who also run language blogs
• Members of the department update the blog with news items relevant to students' interests and their language studies
• The blog is updated approximately once or twice a week
• All comments are moderated to ensure pupil safety
• Parental permission is always sought when images of students are published
• Students are encouraged to only use their first name when leaving comments
• Pupils work in their exercise book is scanned and put on the blog as a way of celebrating success
• Sixth formers publicise language taster weeks, where students learn Arabic, Cantonese and Japanese, by writing about it and taking photographs
• Trips abroad are moblogged so parents can share in the experience by reading about what their children are doing when away from home
• Year 12 students work collaboratively to publish their own downloadable magazine on the blog
• Students who do not have an Internet connection at home can access the blog in the languages department's ICT suite
• Students use tools such as VoiceThread to leave comments about foreign language adverts, the results of which are published on the blog
• Students can access the blog on their mobile phones

Evidence of success

• Students take work to be published on the blog seriously as only one comment has not been approved in two years
• Students have enjoyed using the blog and having the opportunity to see each other's work
• Other departments, Art and Chemistry, have decided to set up blogs, having seen how the MFL one is being used
• The profile of the languages department across the school has been raised
• The range of comments left on the blog prove it is being read by people in the local community, and around the world
• Visitors from around the world are recorded on a cluster map on the blog, thus demonstrating how many people are looking at students' work
• The blog's sitemeter shows that over 8500 hits (about 100-120 per week on average) have been received in two years proving it has a growing readership
• The February 2008 Ofsted inspection gave positive feedback on the use of the blog in the MFL department

Future developments

• Students work more collaboratively and independently online
• They compare their work with their peers and learn more from each other
• Teachers model good examples of previously blogged work to younger pupils
• Students are allowed more flexibility to learn how and when they want
• Students access more examples of authentic resources to improve their cultural awareness
• Local colleagues start blogging and sharing ideas with each other

Author: Joe Dale, Nodehill Middle School, Isle of Wight