Wednesday 1 February 2023

Welcome to the world of teaching literature

 Today I had the great privilege of talking to the Modern Language PGCE students from Queen's University, Belfast. The first talk was about using technology for assessment, marking and feedback (see previous post)

The second talk was one of my personal favourites in teaching, teaching literature to A level Spanish students 


Using technology for assessment, marking and feedback

Tuesday 9 March 2021

Flippity quiz show on GCSE Spanish Daily Routine and A level ser and estar

Today I used the flippity.net quiz show template to create translation sentences into both Spanish and English on the topic of Daily Routine. We played Blooket as a warmup and then went to the quiz show. This group is very bright but fairly quiet so I had to work quite hard to get them to collaborate and venture answers but we got there in the end. 
Here is the link to the GCSE Sp daily routine game and this one is for Ser and Estar for A level. 

Friday 5 March 2021

If you can't pay it back, pay it forward

 As those of us in the know, know, so to speak, there is really no better community of educators than the Modern Language teachers, known collectively as the #mfltwitterati amongst others. The sharing of ideas and resources is unbelievable and inspiring. 

Today I asked for help applying the theories of Gianfranco Conti re the correct order of activities and almost immediately I had access to resources  from @SrSpall@BotonesSalgado,  @Aurelie_LTH and @MrsWardMFL 

I took our existing PPTs, then took inspiration from Aurelie's templates for more Spanish activities on the topic of clothes and combined them into one mega-PowerPoint. You can download it from Slideshare here 

I want to add that my brilliant colleague Julie in the Spanish dept isn't on Twitter but constantly makes resources for our dept, some slides of which are in here. 

Tuesday 16 February 2021

Deck.Toys delight

Within a day of starting to use Deck.Toys I had already decided that the potential was so great that it was worth investing in the Pro account.  So far I have made KS3 sets on shopping, house and clothes, a GCSE set for daily routine and an A level set for subjunctive phrases. 


Esmeralda Salgado has made a really useful Youtube video about creating your decks.  You can choose different templates, from linear to a boardgame. 






We have all the vocab for KS3 and GCSE on our Quizlet so I was easily able to export the vocab sets to Deck Toys to use as the study set within each deck.  I also exported them to Blooket, Gimkit and Flippity as well as quickly creating activities on Wordwall and and Learning Apps. I was then able to embed those activities into my Deck as well as using the plethora of activities available within the deck. 


It's easy to assign a deck to a classroom or share with other teachers. I'm also sharing the decks I make via a Wakelet collection 


To my mind, Deck Toys has the ability to pull together some of my favourite websites for practising and embedding vocabulary. I look forward to getting feedback from the pupils once they have had a go at working through them on their own.