Institution: St Julie's Catholic High School for Girls

St Julie’s Catholic High School for Girls in Liverpool has Specialist Language College Status and has taken part in Action Research and Digital Video projects with CILT. Teachers in the Modern Languages Department have worked successfully with a partner school in France to engage pupils in collaborative language work using the medium of social networking.

Context
St Julie's is a large Roman Catholic secondary school, predominantly for girls but with boys admitted into sixth form. There are 1350 pupils on roll, 200 of whom are in the sixth form.

French, Spanish, and German are taught to A level and Mandarin Chinese is offered to GCSE. The languages department at St Julie’s enjoys excellent accommodation in the Language Learning Centre, which comprises 8 classrooms, a state-of-the-art ICT suite a teaching base for the Foreign Language Assistants and several small open areas where innovative MFL teaching and learning can take place. There are plans to develop a small MFL library resource base and reading area.

Each classroom is equipped with an interactive whiteboard, a whiteboard and overhead projector, a television, video recorder combi and a tape recorder. All classrooms have internet access.

What is the project?
Using Think.com with Year 10 French pupils to improve language skills and motivate them by enabling collaborative work with their peers in their French partner school, Collège Paul Eluard, Vigneux-sur-Seine, France.

Think.com is a free online protected learning and social networking tool developed specifically to enable schools anywhere in the world to form partnerships and engage pupils in collaborative learning activities.

Key objectives

• To motivate pupils by allowing them access to real French speakers of their own age.
• To use the social networking functionality of Think.com to promote independent communication between the French and English pupils.
• To provide a safe online learning environment for collaborative work with a French partner school.
• To enable pupils to refine their topic work by giving them a forum in which to display it as well as online access to their work.

How activities are organised
Accounts and passwords on Think.com were set up for English and French students by a member of St. Julie’s staff. Permissions were established to enable both sides to link to shared project pages. This was easily accomplished following instructions provided online at Think.com, which has extensive support pages and a support forum. Students were instructed in the essentials of using the site and given time to familiarise themselves with the various tools available. Students prepared introductions about themselves. St Julie's girls used the writing text and list-making tools provided to produce written profiles of themselves with relevant pictures, all of which they uploaded to the site. Students at Collège Paul Eluard produced PowerPoint presentations which they uploaded into the shared pages for their English counterparts to download and read. The French students wrote in English and English students in French and were then free to contact each other by sending messages in the language of their choice. English students were told to correct a French counterpart's work, by making just two or three suggestions: this limitation was to avoid the native speaker distorting or improving the piece of work too much. French students reciprocated and most students enjoyed the experience.

In order to encourage communication and increase motivation it was decided by both English and French teachers to allow students to use 'texting' language when posting messages to each other. This tended to be largely phoneticised and provided a platform for teacher explanation. However, in other work they all used the appropriate form of their respective target language. Students continued to refine and upload presentations of their GCSE topics, covering such areas as:

• a famous person I admire;
• • introductions;
  • family friends and hobbies;
  • my country;
  • my city.

Topic work was prepared initially in classroom-based lessons and then was transcribed from notes and exercise books into Word documents saved on the school network and then uploaded toThink.com. This ensured that there was a copy of students’ work in the school network as well as one they could access from home on the social networking site. The class teacher was able to check and comment on the quality of work produced. The moderator could follow the student message section to see that there was interaction between students, even though they were never online at the same time.  Students worked hard and thoughtfully to make sure that their work was thorough and of substantial length. Students enjoyed the interactions and the motivational aspect of using the ICT suite and the software to work at their own pace. 

Evidence of success
The group was motivated by the contact with French counterparts. Students found the interface very easy to use and commented on the fact that it was a social networking site similar in style to ones they use in their personal lives.

Several students, without any direction from their teacher, used the networking facilities to contact students in other countries and interact with them. To do this, students used the Think.com 'stickies' function to leave a virtual 'post-it' on another student’s homepage and to initiate a dialogue with that person. The exchange of stickies remains on the student’s homepage and the thread can be followed. An upgrade has replaced the stickies with a 'send a message' facility, which allows messages of up to 4000 characters to be exchanged.

There was evidence of increased motivation in that students were creating pages and exchanging messages from their home computers and clearly enjoying being in touch with other students; not just with their French peers, but also with students in many other countries.

It was hoped that the motivational pull of this kind of safe social networking site would improve language performance and there is some evidence that this happened, albeit within the time limitations of the project. Several students were taking part in a summer trip to French-speaking Togo and saved work that was relevant to their visit in Think.com for access in Togo.

The ease of use enabled St Julie’s to use social networking with students of all ages, from primary to 14 to 19 year olds and with adults at evening classes.

Next steps
St Julie's has used the Think.com software for a variety of projects and plans to use it more extensively for projects at GCSE and A level. The focus in the future is likely to be on:

• Recording of mp3s, videos and slideshow photo stories with music and voiceovers to upload into the site for comment by counterparts abroad.
• Use of the think interaction tools- 'vote' 'message board' 'debate' 'ask me' and  'brainstorm' to provoke debate on AS and A level topics, both with real French students and using French as a lingua franca for English students and those of other nationalities studying French.
• Use of Think.com tools to set up evaluation questions, to see how effective students feel this approach to language learning is.
• Ensuring that French counterparts produce material for reading and listening comprehension in French, rather than just in English.
• Setting up of revision materials that can be accessed remotely during examination periods and allow communication with teachers.
• Monitoring to determine improvements in target language competence over time as a result of social networking.