Jon Lee has posted some very funny commercials encouraging people to learn another language.

I stuck one here for your enjoyment. You might like to show them to your class to add some ’significance’ and laughs to what they’re doing.

Technorati Tags: ads, commercials, languages, learning

The last few weeks I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese, known by the Chinese as Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (literally "common speech"). I started learning it as soon as I found out that I would be teaching year 5 and 6 students a unit on China and the Olympics on my term 3 internship this year. I believe knowing even parts of a language gives you so many more opportunities when teaching about a culture and a people. It might seem a bit zany to take up a language and try to learn as much as possible in a couple of months, but after having so much success starting my journey into Spanish and French, I thought why not?

I started out at the same place I did with French and Spanish, with the Michel Thomas Method audio CD’s. The Mandarin Chinese CD’s are quite new, and this time are taught by Harold Goodman. As always, the concentration is on the structure of the language, but this time things are taken more slowly. Chinese is so different to Western (I hate that word) languages because of its tones. There are four tones in Mandarin plus a neutral tone, and syllables are spoken in these tones. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually very easy. Goodman teaches you to move your hand to denote the tone you are speaking, so that you get used to using them and to help you remember the tones for each word. For instance, the word for ‘to be’ is shì, which uses a falling tone. You are taught to point your index finger towards the ground as you say it. Strangely, it helps very much, and reminds you to use the tone correctly.

So where am I going with this? Well, it gives a layer to learning about China that makes a very big difference. When I’m teaching the students, every word they come across that’s written in Pinyin can be pronounced in correct Chinese by following the tones written above the vowels. Sìchuān, the province at the epicentre of the recent tragic earthquake, is pronounced with a falling tone and a flat tone. Every time a name of a person or place, or a new Chinese word is taught, I intend to visually show the students the tones, so that they can get used to saying them properly.

I’m hoping that even teaching the students a little bit of the language over the course of the term should make a big difference to how they approach new languages as they go into high school next year.

I’m hoping I can also inspire a few teachers on my way to start learning a new language. I learn from the audio CD’s in the car to start with and it takes no time away from my day. I probably get a few strange looks from other motorists as I attempt sentences in a new language, but strange looks have always been saved for me, so that’s okay. From there you can take your learning as far as you like, but it’s just not that hard to start and it’s one of those things that you’ll always be glad that you did. I finished the Michel Thomas French foundation and advanced courses a few weeks ago, and it has gotten me to a place where I understand the structure of sentences and can construct my own sentences to say many things that I want to. It’s a matter of extending my vocabulary now and I plan to take that far using Livemocha and reading French news and interviews on the internet. As for Chinese, I’m only halfway through the foundation course, but it’s already given me so much insight into the language and culture that I couldn’t have gotten any other way.
I’ll keep posting my progress with both the learning and the teaching. Please post a comment and tell me how you feel about teachers learning new languages.

妳好老师。文是好。 (simplified Chinese)

nǐ hǎo lǎoshī。 wén shì hǎo。(Pinyin)

Hello teachers. Languages are good. (English)

Technorati Tags: china, chinese, mandarin, livemocha, michel thomas, language, pinyin, teachers, learning, education, internship, tones

Social networking sites have a bad name, and with good reason! The big two, MySpace and Facebook are huge, clunky distributors of spam and generally a waste of time. Yes, they have positive points but they can never make up for the billions of hours people have wasted poking their friends and playing zombies or vampires (yes, I’m on Facebook. What a hypocrite!).

That’s why when Livemocha came along late last year, people started to take notice. Waltzing onto the scene with lofty promises that people might actually learn something on their social network, Livemocha have actually delivered.

I started learning Spanish late last year as solace from the grief of losing our first son a week before he was due to be born. I learned in the car from the wonderful Michel Thomas CD’s. After completing the Spanish 8-CD set and Advanced Spanish 5-CD set a few times, I went on to learn French using the same system. While doing this, I found out about Livemocha, and it’s opened a door into communication with people fluent in the languages I have been studying. It’s a give and take system, where everyone can submit writing and sound bites of them speaking, and others who are native, fluent or more experienced in the language can leave feedback. There are also lessons with pictures, text and sound that are followed by activities such as ordering words into sentences or the selecting the correct translation. On top of this, the service has a polished chat application that integrates typing, speaking and webcam depending on what the users have at their disposal. It’s the most comfortable I’ve felt communicating with people from other countries, because the expectation is already there that everyone is there to learn.

Some of the most exciting prospects are for its use in the classroom. Apparently, they plan to incorporate more tools suited to online classroom instruction. Collaborative interaction between students in schools learning each other’s native languages would be a welcome addition to traditional forms of language instruction. They are also planning to forge partnerships with language institutes and involve themselves with natural language certifications.

I started a Livemocha article on Wikipedia when I discovered no one else had. If you’re familiar with Livemocha, why not add to it? It needs a lot of work! If you’re not familiar with Livemocha, take a look. It’s a buzz just to see how well a previously annoying technology can be applied to learning pursuits, and for it to be such a success.

Technorati Tags: social networking, spanish, french, livemocha, michel thomas, language, collaboration, wikipedia

Welcome to the Great Education Mentation, a blog about education in the modern classroom. It will effectively act as a professional journal for me to reflect on my teaching, students’ learning and classroom ecology as well as a record of the tools and ideas that I explore.

I’ll be taking a look at educational tools and techniques for thinking skills, research skills and language learning, some necessary skills for the digital age that have traditionally been overlooked in our education systems. They also happen to be some of the things I’m most interested in!

I’ve spent far too many hours dabbling with all things computers (just ask my wife!), so I’ll be taking a look at what lies in store for today and tomorrow’s classrooms, particularly how best to implement technology in the classroom to improve learning. Nothing grates me more than technology for its own sake.

This isn’t a blog by an experienced practitioner or expert in any field; education, ICT, languages or otherwise, and it isn’t going to try to be. Incidentally, if that’s what you’re after, edublogs and my own blog aggregator planet.thinked.net might be a good place to start. Hopefully this will be an interesting and worthwhile chronicle of my thoughts, experiences and explorations in education. Heading into my internship and real-life teaching (finally!) later this year, I’ll be on the lookout for teaching techniques, learning tools and possibilities, both new and old.

Maybe we’ll learn something together? :)

Technorati Tags: blog, aggregator, education, thinking skills, research skills, language, teaching, learning