Continuing the series Technology in Modern Foreign Languages, Mary Cooch explains how she has used a Virtual Learning Environment – Moodle in this case – to overcome the loss of German as a taught subject within the school’s curriculum and analyses how effective using Moodle has been.
My degree is actually in French with Norwegian. Mindful that there isn’t much call for Norwegian teachers in the North West of England, I did my PGCE in French and German. When I was offered a job at my current school (the only job I’ve ever had) I was asked if I would mind, in a full timetable of French, just teaching one hour a week German as a favour. I agreed, and somehow during the ensuing 24 years I ended up in charge of German despite myself.
In recent years it’s become even harder than normal to motivate most students to learn German or opt for it at GCSE. When the only other Germanist in the department retired and two keen new MFL NQTs arrived with Spanish as their specialism, it seemed a good time to change departmental policy: we would offer Spanish alongside French in the main curriculum, with German as an added extra.
Rather than bemoan the loss of a language I never actually intended to teach, or worry that those few students showing an interest in German would suffer as a consequence, I saw it as a great opportunity to use our VLE – Moodle – as a vehicle for delivering the bulk of the learning.
In Key Stage 3 we offered a one hour a week after school German club to Years 8 and 9 – the only face to face experience of German the children would have. We focused on oral work with a great emphasis on games (it was a club, after all!). The only requirement to join was that the children accessed our club page on the VLE and did the activities there in the days between meetings.
I set up the page (Moodle calls them “courses”) in weekly sections with the resources we’d used in class; practice tasks to consolidate the grammar, and home works which they had to send in to me to mark online before the next club session. We used so-called SCORM compliant games from Contentgenerator and Linguascope which meant that while the pupils thought they were playing games, the VLE was saving their scores (to justify their fun to SLT!).
Club members used Audacity to record themselves having conversations and then used Crazy Talk to put funny faces to the voices – then I embedded the videos on our Moodle club page. We also tried a bit of blue screening – well, ok; it was a blue sheet I stuck to my whiteboard with blu-tak but it worked! Moviemaker has a plugin to enable you to bluescreen, which is OK but not great, so we ended up using Serif Movie X3 from the school network – very cheap and highly recommended.
The onus was very much on them to take their learning further – and, in fact, developing their independence would stand two of the pupils in good stead the following year when they opted to do German GSCE. Two pupils and one teacher was considered not economically viable to run in school time – so, once more, I turned to Moodle.
I taught two girls GSCE German for one hour after school every week, using another Moodle course to keep us in touch between times. They asked me questions via a private discussion forum; they kept their own notes in personal wikis on the course page; I uploaded sample speaking test presentations as .mp3; they uploaded their efforts to me as assignments .
Vocabulary and grammar were tested by the –now totally free – Hotpotatoes and Moodle’s inbuilt Quiz module. Both these allow you to include video, sound and images to brighten up the exercises. They will mark the work for you and record the grades in Moodle ‘s mark book- a win-win situation! Despite that, I still worried last summer on results day. Could we really get good grades on one hour a week plus Moodle? I seriously misjudged the girls and feel very bad about it. I predicted a B and a C. They got an A* and a B respectively…
This year I’ve passed the German mantle onto a colleague, as I’m focusing pretty much full time on Moodle. However, I’m involved in Primary Liaison and Year 5s from our feeder schools have been visiting us for a “fun session using our VLE” All they know when they arrive is that they will be playing some games on our Moodle for an hour and that they will leave having learned something they never knew before. As it’s billed as a “ Mystery Moodle” session , I obviously cannot tell you what they do and what they then rush home to continue with on our VLE… But isn’t it fortunate how German has so many cognates to build confidence in young learners…?
Mary Cooch
Mary Cooch has taught Languages and Geography at Our Lady’s Catholic High School in Preston. Mary is the author of Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds, as well as a VLE trainer specialising in Moodle.
Mary’s websites are listed here http://www.marycooch.com/
Twitter: @moodlefairy
