Institution: Helston Community College
Context
Helston Community College (HCC) is a mixed 11-19 establishment with
more than 100
teaching staff and 1626 pupils, of whom over
356 are in the Sixth Form. It is situated at the gateway to the
Lizard, Britain’s most southerly point. HCC is a Specialist
Technology College and is set in twenty-two acres of playing
fields. In addition to standard classrooms, the school has a range
of specialist facilities and equipment including purpose-built
music and MFL blocks. The college is recognised as an established
'Quality in Study Support' centre for its Out-Of-Hours-Learning
facilities. At the heart of this provision is DISC, the Drop
In Study Centre.
Key objectives
- To make creative use of ICT to help students to prepare for
their GCSE speaking test
- To support different learning styles through the use of
ICT.
How the programme is organised
At Helston,
students of all ages are encouraged to make full use of the
opportunities that ICT has to offer them in supporting their
learning.
Year 8 pupils have created their own Spanish blog to record a
day in the life of the college. Year 9 French students are
beginning to work with Windows Movie Maker to create their own
short animations in the form of a French Whodunnit? Students in
Year 12 have created their own
podcast offering advice in Spanish on staying fit and
healthy.
Windows Movie Maker, Audacity (a free downloadable audio editor)
and Flickr (a photo and video hosting website) are currently being
used to create
revision materials for Years 10/11 for their speaking conversation
tests and it is also planned to have Year 10 Spanish students
create their own revision videos using the same software.
The college has kindly made available to download a
document, which they give to students, explaining how to make your
own video
presentation using Windows Movie Maker, Audacity and Flickr
(doc, 1.6MB) which they give to students.
Evidence of success
Although there is no firm evidence to support the link between the
use of ICT and student uptake, for the last two years languages
have been the most popular option choice out of all the subjects on
offer at KS4. The languages department at Helston endeavours to
ensure that all groups have access to a digital language laboratory
at least once a fortnight, where there is a wide range of
resources.
'The revision video is an innovative and
impressive tool that will certainly help pupils to prepare for the
speaking component of the examination. It has clearly motivated the
students.' Andy Dalgleish, Head of Cultural Studies
Faculty.
Over the last two to three years, students have been encouraged
to be more creative by offering them a degree of independence
through project work, such as creating stories.
Future developments
It is hoped that in addition to KS4 Spanish, members of the MFL
department will use Windows Movie Maker with other year groups and
languages. Some Year 9 French groups are using the software to
create video animations. It is hoped to develop this further by
having students create similar video projects for younger
students.
James Pearson, the Head of MFL at Helston, has delivered a
number of INSET sessions on the use of ICT to modern languages’
teachers, both locally and nationally, and would like to
incorporate lessons learnt from practice at Helston into future
INSET. In the longer term, it is hoped to continue creating video
tutorials for students and teachers that would cover a variety of
uses of ICT in languages teaching.
Further resources
Author: James Pearson, Helston Community College