Facilitating Online

This is my first post regarding the Facilitating Online course I am attending this term on Wikieducator. This course is free unless you want to attend as a facilitated student. I have been very lucky (again!!) as I have been given a Mark Williams Award by the NZAFT (New Zealand Association of French Teachers). This award has allowed me to take on this course as a facilitated student.

So far we are in our second week, and I have to admit I very much enjoy it. Last Thursday night, I participated to an Elluminate session facilitated by Sarah Stewart. I had heard about Elluminate but I had never participated to any session. I am more familiar with Flashmeeting.

In this week’s activity we were asked to watch the video of Clive Shepherd called "Welcome to the virtual classroom" . This is a very well done video, easy to understand with a clear message backed up with nice and bright pictures. Among other things, it explains effectively the differences between Synchronous and Asynchronous communication. I knew those two terms, but if I had not known them the explanation given was so clear that I would know by now.

In this week’s activity I have also been asked to answer the following questions :


What do I want to learn to facilitate?

As this year I am going to teach for the first time Year 11 French (3 years into French/ the year of the first national exam) via Video Conferencing, I need to learn how to facilitate effectively a course. I can teach but I have always taught in a classroom with the students in the same room as me. The biggest problem for me I reckon is going to cater well for those students. I need to rethink the whole program and my whole teaching pedagogy. I cannot just do the same thing I do in class but online. I cannot rely anymore on my sense of humour and my funny faces to make the message go through.
Watching Clive Shepherd’s video and also taking this course online and looking at how the course has been set up, made me realise that the little ideas that I had so far on how I am going to set up my own course were not very good. So I need to read a bit more about how others are setting up their course, especially for teenagers.

What am I doing now in terms of online facilitation?

Nothing at all. Last Thursday during our first Elluminate event, Sarah told us that we will have to facilitate an event during our course. This is actually a brilliant news for me as it will give me some experience before starting with teenagers. I hope that adults would be more forgiven that 16 year olds.

What would I like to achieve ?

I would want that by the end of this course I am not only capable of facilitating an event successfully but that I will also have a clearer idea and maybe a proper plan on how to set up my Own French course.


What do I need to do to achieve this goal?

I need to follow the course consciously and I will need to read online articles and look at what other teachers have done before in order to learn from their successes and mistakes.


Photo source : http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1302/1137999449_d5ab04b27d_o.jpg

Grammar in Year 11 French class

My Year 11 French surprised me last week. No, they did not buy an Ipad although I made it clear to them that I would be very happy getting one :-)

Instead of an Ipad (or an Iphone!!) I got some revelations which I was not expecting at all.

My lovely class told me that they would like to spend 20 minutes in each lesson doing some grammar exercises and conjugate verbs.

I have to admit that I was very much gob smacked !


As I have been their teacher for the last 3 years, they have not been used to do grammar exercises. So they are not looking for some comfort in my class. The reason why they want to do grammar is not clear at all for me. When I asked them they said that if they take French is to do some serious work. “Doing fun stuff is not proper learning” were their own words. “If we take French it is because we don’t want to mack around”.

I have to add that they were not complaining about my teaching at all. The class likes me, and I know that because they told me during the same week that I was as cute as Dora the Explorer ( No, I do not have a backpack on !!!). So their request was not about revolting.


I took notes of what they were asking, and at the end of their suggestion I told them that the way they want me to teach is the opposite that we as language teachers are asked to do. I added that it is advised to teachers not to use the word “grammar” as “students find it scary and boring”. I also pointed out to them that the way they want me to teach is very much how languages were taught 40 years ago.


But the best comment came from Eden. When I told them that in all the conferences I go to we teachers are told not to teach like that, Eden said “ Maybe we should be invited to your conferences and teachers should listen and ask us the way we want to be taught”


I am very much gob smacked !!!!


Image resource: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitmMQOj0Iyu7F6CbvpS-R1yEctrK3007j_IgIl3l1Ho0V2CHDdFlg0ZA_rZlJFKGaXGOu8PJlqHOC3JPQyPanBpwaqbs9HkRlp7UFGZa1u132AqNdCZVwMQdJQ2m_PaYnFC5yptdf82Wiv/s400/humor+7.jpg

It is people, it is people, it is people!

Ui mai koe ki ahau he aha te mea nui o te ao, Māku e kī atu he tangata, he tangata, he tangata!
"Ask me what is the greatest thing in the world, I will reply: It is people, it is people, it is people!

People and learning are unconditionally linked. There is no doubt about it at all. Here at Learning at School Conference in Rotorua all teachers and educators of all sorts are the living proof of that.

Although this is a wonderful annual conference which I was very lucky to attend, I have learned most from people and networking. The breakouts and keynotes I participated in were of a high quality and well prepared - some next posts will come soon highlighting the presentations I went to- but I have to admit what I have more appreciated was meeting people as conversations lead to learning, and sometimes you can learn so much more with someone in half an hour than in a class environment for 2 hours.

I want to thank Core Education for organising such a huge conference despite the terrible earthquake in Christchurch that happened the day before. I also want to thank Vince Ham and Michael Winter from Core Education for helping the 2010 eFellows to attend this conference.


Read the next posts about what I have learned


à suivre….

photo source : http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1266/542362245_5a183a0507.jpg

French is a Child's highlight of the year

Today I was the princess of the assembly at the local Intermediate School.


This year I have been teaching French to two Year 8 classes and mentoring their 2 teachers at the local Intermediate School and today was our last lesson.

I have to admit the year has gone very fast and I cannot believe how much the students have achieved! I taught each class alternatively (one class one week, the other class the other week) and the teacher was reinforcing what we did during the week I was not here. Each lesson lasted around 30 minutes. I taught during my free periods. In other words, I get 5 free periods during which I am supposed to plan my lessons, do the massive amount of admin that a teacher has to do etc...during one of those free period I went during the whole year teaching across the field at an Intermediate School. (for free of course!)

During the year we went through what my Year 9 do but faster (much faster!).

Last week, the Year 8 had to write their graduation papers where they write down what was the highlight of their year. In one of the class (Room 1), out of 28 kids, 20 students said the highlight for them was to learn French !!!!

It is at that moment that I felt the happiest !!!! All the hard work that the 2 teachers and myself have put in has paid off !!! It was all worth it.

So to celebrate the end of the year, the students have invited me for a special assembly. I watched them singing a song in French and playing games (about numbers). We then had a special morning tea. A little girl baked some muffins and wrote in dark blue icing “MERCI” on them (it means thank you). They gave me a giant bouquet of flowers, which I can smell right now while I am writing this post and offered me some chocolates. It was fantastic to have kids hugging me, thanking me and asking to have a picture taken with me. I felt like a princess, I think it was the moment a teacher dreams about during her whole teaching life.

Merci beaucoup Room 1 and Room 7

Edtalks saved my Flight

I hate flying so much !!!! In the morning of the day of my flight I start to have butterflies in my stomach until the plane arrives at destination and that I know I have not burned alive i the air or crushed in the middle of the ocean. Of course I know the risk of me dying while driving to my way to work is way higher than dying in a plane, but fear has no reason.

So to calm me down I download videos and watch them during the flight with full volume on.

Yesterday I came back from Christchurch and I had downloaded a video on my Itouch in order to forget I was sitting on a chair in the middle of the sky. I took the video from the Edtalks website.

For the teachers in New Zealand, Edtalks is a very famous website where videos of educators are hosted. It is a site created and looked after by Core Education.

There are heaps of videos to choose, from Toni Twiss’s video “Living and learning in the cloud” to “Effectiveness of e-learning PD” from Vince Ham.

Yesterday, I picked the video from Lee Crockett, “Understanding the digital generation”. I was lucky enough this year to go to Ulearn where I have seen Lee Crockett presenting “live”. I was blown away during his keynote as he made me think about what I was doing in my class.

The second time it is even better !!!! As I am planning courses for next year, watching the video again was the best move for me as it has reminded me what to include or not in my teaching.

What ever the subject you are teaching, this video plays a pivotal role in a healthy vision of teaching nowadays.

Why NCEA ?

When you are a secondary teacher it is now NCEA time. It means that your students are setting their final exams of the year .

While I was quite happy with the exam of my Year 12- for once no French words have been invented and the texts actually made sense- I was thinking “what am I doing??” as I was reading the text for the listening activity.


What is the point of the exam???

The texts in the exam are made to trap the students, not actually to see how much they actually know. It seems that the person who writes the exam looks at a vocabulary list and thinks “ well now what are the most difficult words?”, then, try to make a plausible story using those words.

why? what is the aim of a such activity?

Certainly not to encourage kids carry on with a language ! I could understand if it was a test to reward their learning, to show them how much they have learned this year and/or for the last 5 years , but why trying to make them fail ????

Rosa rosa rosam ......

When I say to people I am a French teacher I hear a lot of different comments, including the one “ I didn’t like French when I was at school, I was very bad at it! And it was very boring, we had to conjugate verbs”.

I usually try to tell people that the teaching has changed since the time they went to school and that I do not ask my students to conjugate verbs.

How surprise was I during my last lesson with my Year 12 when I asked them what I could do to be a better teacher, what I could have done better this year !! Unanimously they answered that they would like to do more conjugation in class and for homework.

I could not believe what I heard. I thought they were going to tell me that they should do some more fun stuff, or watch some more movies or do some more ICT activities. But No !!!! They want to take a verb and conjugate it in different tenses.


I have been teaching those students since Year 9 and I have never done conjugation with them. So they do not want to do conjugation because their previous teacher used to do this type of activity with them. I have to admit I am not sure why they would want to do some conjugation !!!! It is not even a requirement for NCEA, so the excuse of getting a better grade at exam is not even a valid argument.