primary education

The Dutch LinQ project promotes French and German next to English in NL Primary Education. Skype is used to support e-Twinning contacts between schools using a Tandem approach. The IWB helps to share the connection to native speakers. See this report at the NL version of Teacher TV: Leraar 24

Just passing on these suggestions made on the ICT-section of the Primary Languages site:

[...] With just some very basic techniques, the interactive whiteboard can be used for a wide range of enjoyable and challenging activities: The children (and I) enjoy moving words, sentences and pictures around the board for labelling pictures or to construct sentences. Such fun! (Cathy O'Brien, Leading Practitioner from Abbotts Primary, Collyhurst Manchester).

Try using the interactive whiteboard to highlight linguistic features in different colours. This simple idea is ideal for use when encouraging children to develop their knowledge about language. 

Invite the children to the interactive whiteboard to 'make' a pizza - this activity also presents good opportunities to talk about weights and quantities with the support of images. Follow these steps:

• Display a range of pictures of different toppings and large pizza base on the whiteboard.
• Following your instructions, children come to the board to move different toppings onto the base to create their own pizza, pronouncing the names of the toppings they have chosen. 
• The children could then ask classmates to come up with a name for their pizza or to suggest other toppings that they would prefer.
• This could lead into a class discussion around which foods the children like and healthy eating. Together you could conduct a survey of opinions to display as a graph or chart on the whiteboard.
• Children could go on to make real pizzas in pairs or small groups, using digital cameras to take photos of the preparation. These images could then be included in a Powerpoint presentation with simple instructions showing how it was made... and eaten!

Making links

ICT has a huge role to play in helping you to forge cross-curricular links. Numeracy, literacy, investigative skills, design technology, art and music can all be combined with languages using ICT. Working across a range of subject areas, children can use equipment such as digital cameras and camcorders, and hone their skills using programmes such as PowerPoint, Excel and Word.

For instance, this video clip of work around the artist Kandinsky on the Training Zone shows a class exploring the links between art, shapes and language. For further examples of opportunities for cross-curricular links, visit primary languages ezine issue 6.

Ask children to research the weather in Mallorca, Hamburg and Nice using the internet - this could lead to a presentation about weather in different parts of Europe, perhaps with weather charts imported into a simple PowerPoint presentation.

It's hard to keep up with all the people talking about The Magnetic Poetry for Kids website.

First of all, this is a very simple  concept. The site has a work area on the left side of the screen and a collection of words and/or phrases on the right-hand side. To use the program, students simply touch and drag the words into the work area. Words can be moved around with ease and placed anywhere the student or teacher desires.

Teachers could easily prepare the work area to contain words for the students to use to build sentences or they could allow students to explore the word collection and choose their own. This may help teachers to differentiate the learning process and control the difficulty of the task.

"Make a sentence that contains one noun, one verb, and one adjective."
"Build a 10 word sentence from the group of words in the word collection."
"Find all the nouns in the top part of the refrigerator.
"Find the verbs that describe what you can do on a rainy day."

The kids area contains four different kits that contain different word collections including a "First Words" kit and a "Story Maker" kit.

(Once again, a big thanks to Danny Nicholson and everyone else who has mentioned this site for getting the word out! )

48% of primary schools in the Netherlands has access to one or more IWBs. This is a strong increase over last year, then only 11% of the schools had a digiboard.

And if managers in primary educations manage to realise their ambitions and policy intentions, digiboards will be available in 83% of the primary schools in two years' time.

(source: Four in Balance. ICT-Monitor 2008)