John Bald/language and literacy

German - Clicker Set, Time, manner, place.

This is the first series of Clicker grids I've made, and the idea is that each element is on a separate grid, so that pupils compose sentences by inserting them in the correct sequence. These are screen dumps of the grid, which operates using the program Clicker 6 (Cricksoft.com)  With the program loaded, clicking on the bottom right moves to the next grid and there is an optional speech engine that will read the sentence back when you click on the full stop at the end. I will demo to any interested teacher via webex. Having composed sentences, the children write them from memory. They do not copy, ever! No charge, and for the record,  I don't have shares in Clicker 6. NB - the screen dumps here are slightly fuzzy. The originals are crystal-clear on the screen.

A couple of wrinkles to make this type of grid. Select template in the Clicker 6 menu, and once you have a blank grid, click on it to uncluster the cells. This lets you resize and move them. Create new grids in the series by duplicating. To move to the next grid, right click on the full stop box, go to choose and select move to next. Repeat, go to send and insert send no text. The same will work for any multiple grid. Pictures or video can be inserted into any cell using drag and drop.

Books Plus - Flip PDF professional

Flip pdf professional is an extraordinary piece of software that allows us to integrate video and audio clips into a screen-based books that simulate normal reading experience - page turning, flicking through - while bringing all dimensions of language learning together. I started to investigate it on the recommendation of my friend John Keeble, who has written several publications, including this book on photography, and immediately found that it made my teaching assistant's handbook much more attractive and flexible. I'm going to revise this and all of my other publications using this software, adding illustrations and video wherever possible. Flip offers a 50% discount to educational users, which it has extended to this site, making the cost to schools just under £100 for the full version. It will bring professional presentation to the book, which can then be used on every conceivable platform, and allow schools and clusters complete control over their own materials. It's also so easy to use that it will make writing almost a pleasure... 

Audacity - free. Lets you add a sound file to any resource. A couple of hints.

Audacity is a freely downloadable sound deck that we can use to add a high-quality sound file to any resource. For people highly skilled in ICT, it is straightforward to use. I'm not... so here is how I managed to use it.

First of all, audacity loads very easily, though it offers a lot of other add-ons that you may not want. They're not scams, but be careful to reject them.  Make sure you have a working microphone - I found the one on my webcam worked perfectly well. Then, you have a screen with a red button to press to start. Make your recording, which can be anything from one word upwards, and press the square button to stop.

You then need to export the file rather than just save it, and put it into a format your computer will read. If you simply save it, it will stay in Audacity's own format, and your computer won't necessarily be able to use it. As I'm on PC, I select the microsoft .wav format from the menu. 

Next, when you export the file, put it into the same folder as your original resource, and keep them together. If you want to use your resource on another computer, make sure you transfer the whole folder to it and not just the resource - the computer makes a link to the sound file, and does not embed it in your resource. I usually use powerpoint. I go to in insert, then sound from file at the top right. A symbol appears on the slide for me to click to play the sound. Get these couple of little things right, and Audacity will be a good friend.