From the Classroom - Student Posters

Student created posters promoting Japan and some reasons for learning Japanese:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Music and Japanese Lyrics

A while back I wrote here about using music to inspire your Japanese language learning. In class this week my students pointed me towards 'jpopasia', a place to watch music videos and communicate with like minded fans of Japanese and Korean Pop music. The added benefit of this site, from my angle, is that many of the videos have the lyrics (including kanji lyrics) alongside them. This means we can listen to as well as read the Japanese. As mentioned in the post linked above, I learnt a lot of kanji and vocabulary from too much karaoke and now I see many of my students doing the same; as well as learning Japanese through manga and anime. The difference now is accessibility - Japan and Japanese music is so much closer. As the site's authors put it:

All we want is to promote Japanese music outside Japan. It's really hard to find and discover new Japanese music because of the language barrier and availability. We think we can fill this missing link in providing romaji titles and promotional videos.

So, find a song your students like, look at the grammar and kanji in the lyrics and use these to help reinforce the structures and script being learnt in class. In class yesterday, Angela Aki's song Tegami and lyrics helped us to revise a whole heap of kanji and to look at the grammar structures 〜ないで、〜そう（な）and 〜（え）ば. I even learnt a couple of new kanji myself.

Posted via web from Js Nihongo

Yr8 Profiles and MapSkip

A while ago now I wrote about the potential that MapSkip seemed to have as a place for students to create profiles with images and sound. Well, finally we have tried it out in the classroom and were really happy with how the students were engaged in the activity and working together, reading other student's profiles and commenting on them.

This activity came after a couple of weeks of lessons that taught students how to indicate name, age, place they live, nationality and phone number. The idea was for the students to use this knowledge to create a character in the target language (Japanese), create an image for their avatar and then upload these to a map that was accessible by all. Students could then read each others character profiles and hopefully learn from each other. There was also the option for students to record themselves reading the profile and then uploading that to the map. It took about 3 lessons and went something like this...

1. Students created their character, giving information about name, age ,where in Japan they live and their nationality. All of this was fictional and the language was checked before moving to the next step.
2. Students created an avatar using one of the sites in this post from Danny Nicholson. We are a 1:1 laptop school so students saved the image to their computer, either using the Print Screen function or the Windows+S buttons (which saves a clipping straight into OneNote). They then edited in Paint.
   
3. Students were given a password and username to login to MapSkip; the site allows teachers to easily create and monitor student accounts.
   
4. Once in MapSkip, students located the town their character came from in Japan and added a marker to the map. The then added their "story" and avatar image to the map.
   
5. Students recorded themselves reading the profile and then uploaded that to their MapSkip "story". Note: You will need to save your recording as an mp3 file before you can upload. Not all students reached this stage.
6. Students were set homework to read other students' profiles and make a comment. Some wrote comments in Japanese, some in English. I gave feedback via the comment option.
   

All in all the lessons went really well and the level of student engagement was fantastic. The only problem we did encounter was that some students had trouble adding a marker to the map. It either didn't allow it or it placed the marker a long way from its intended spot. One student's character now resides in the Pacific Ocean several hundred kilometres to the east of Japan.

MapSkip, despite the minor setbacks mentioned above, was simple to use for the students and the ability to create and monitor student accounts is really useful. It also allows you to filter out all stories on the map so that only your students' stories are visible.

How about some music to inspire your Japanese learning

I learnt a lot of Japanese, in particular kanji and an ability to read the scripts more fluently, as a result of spending too much time singing karaoke. My excuse, if you'll allow me to go off on a small tangent, was the fact that my host father in Japan owned a Sake shop and we spent many evenings delivering goods to local "Snack bars" (a very mini version of the local pub). My host family lived in what was then the urban fringe and there were very few 'foreigners' around, so during the course of these deliveries I was of great interest to the locals and often called upon to sing; consequently I have no desire to sing "My Way" or "Yesterday" ever again. However, I do quite enjoy a bit of a sing and I began to look for and sing Japanese songs that appealed to me. This was great for my vocabulary and kanji. I would then rent CDs from the rental CD shop (at the time I was amazed that you could actually rent CDs) and study the lyrics. I still do this in a manner of sorts, only now I head to the internet rather than the shop.

So I guess the point I am trying to make is that if you like music, then it is a fabulous means to further engage and connect with a language. As a result, I occasionally throw songs out to my students, with the lyrics, hoping that some of them will like what they hear and explore the language further through song. Although all students will not relate to this I do know that many have and have also gone on to look for more. On top of that, many of them know more of the latest in J-Pop through their interest in Anime, Japanese TV dramas and video games. All in all, listening to music in any language that you are learning is going to help with motivation as well as vocabulary and even grammar. The best videos to find on You Tube are those that have the lyrics as subtitles, something that happens a bit on TV in Japan.

The following are either songs that I have shown to the class and used to help teach a certain phrase or topic or songs that I have recently discovered and plan to somehow weave into a Japanese lesson somewhere down the line...

For time:

For weather and seasons:

Just found this one; will perhaps use it to look at the Japanese syllabry:

And for a little bit of "family" topic related fun, you can't go past this one:

• Do you use music when learning Japanese?

• What Japanese songs do you know that could help with vocabulary, grammar or kanji?

• Please add any in the comments below.

Posted via web from Js Nihongo

Revising with Web2.0

Whilst trying to work out a way to embed some listening and speaking practice (Japanese) into our Yr9 class wiki, as their Yearly Examinations are fast approaching, I came across a link to Yodio in my delicious bookmarks. I had toyed with the idea of trying to add audio to google maps (I still have no idea if you can do it or not) and also creating another video like this one (with Windows movie maker) for listening comprehension but Yodio seemed to be what I was looking for.

Yodio is very simple to use. Once you've registered, it allows you to:

1. Upload images
2. Upload audio either from your computer or directly from your phone (to a US number, so best to only do this if you live in the US).
3. Combine the images and audio into "Yodios". Each yodio can contain several images with a separate recording on each.
4. Share your yodio via email, the website or embed them into your own website

Being able to add audio to images is a powerful tool for language learning. Not only can it be used to create simple listening revision tasks for students, as I have, but students could create all sorts of digital stories around particular themes. Voicethread is also a wonderful tool for this and has the added bonus of allowing for collaboration. I have not yet investigated the terms of use for yodio or fully examined implications for student use; however, a quick look at some of the yodios in the Education (Language courses) category, shows that there are students and educators out there using it.

Some ideas for using it:

• Describe your daily routine
• Take people on an audio tour of you school, house or neighbourhood
• Describe people / family members (physical description / what they are wearing)
  
• Describe what you did on your holiday
• Describe the weather
• .........
  

Here's one I prepared earlier...

Creating profiles, name cards and more

This week was a week for exploring effective ways to use the simple introductions we have been doing in our Year 7 Japanese lessons (Year 7 only have 1 lesson per week of Japanese so we don't get through a lot of content). The ability to indicate your name, age, phone number and where you live is useful but there's not a lot you can do with it (I thought). In the first class of the week I went back to the trusted "business card" creation exercise on the laptop. In other words, use Microsoft publisher to create a business card that displays information about yourself in the target language. However, not satisfied that this was the best way to engage the students in an activity designed to create something with the target language, I had a look around...

For reasons since forgotten I came up with Yu-Gi-Oh (a Japanese manga that has spawned, amongst other things, a trading card game) and stumbled across what I was looking for: Yugioh Card Maker. This site allows you to very easily create your own Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards. The 'description' box was used by the students to indicate the name, age, phone number (even monsters have a phone number these days) and city in which the character lived - all in Japanese (roomaji).

In order to 'save' creations to the Yugioh card maker site you do need to register; however, we simply used the "PRTSC" (print screen) button on the laptops, pasted the image into paint and then trimmed the edges to what we wanted. My own 'masterpiece' is above. The act of creating the cards only took about 5 minutes as we had previously revised, and written down, how to indicate all the things they were required to include.

I knew this activity was going to work the moment I asked the students to explain to me what Yu-Gi-Oh was. Several were obviously right into it and ready to share what they knew. This proved infectious as before long some students had created 2 or 3 cards. My next task is to work out the easiest way to display the cards on the class wiki site.

The next step is to create dialogues and, having just discovered another comic creation website (Bitstrips), I have a couple of ideas...

Japanese Teacher's Conference

A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to volunteer as a presenter at the annual Japanese Teacher’s Conference in Sydney. I was at the stage where I felt I had the confidence to get up and share my Web2.0 journey with my Japanese teaching peers, so I took the plunge and yesterday I presented to my peers for the first time. I loved the experience and felt like I’ve grown a little bit more as a result. After the conference and the presentations I saw, I am more convinced that "Teachers teaching teachers" is definitely the way to go.

Whilst preparing for the presentation I was determined to remain aware of what I had learnt from seeing other presenters in the past few years - and not repeat the mistakes that I had perceived in them. For me, proof that reflection is an important part of what we do. See this post here for clarification on that point. Also, as there are so many fantastic resources out here, I decided it may not be the best strategy to bombard people with information, though it’s very easy to do that without knowing it. So, I decided to try to take people with me on the journey that brought me to a place where I was talking to my peers about how to use technology with language students.

I began by explaining RSS (for visual learners) and readers like Google Reader and Bloglines, before moving on to the power of a PLN and where to go to start building your Personal Learning Network. I suggested that delicious and diigo (diigo groups in particular) were great places to start to do this, also briefly explaining about twitter. Some Web2.0 tools we can use in the classroom with language students was the next stopover and so, at that point in the presentation, I switched over from my version of death by powerpoint to the presentation wiki. I had also intended to show a couple of my class wiki as an example of how I use them but ran out of time; so for those who were at the presentation yesterday (and anyone else out there) check out Year 7 Japanese here.

Of the sites shown in the presentation, Voki seemed to be the biggest hit, and so it should be. It is a great site to get students to practice their speaking skills in a language and gain confidence in using the target language. For other sites I found useful last year, check out this post.

Thanks to all those who attended the presentation and for the positive comments. All feedback is appreciated so please let me know if you have any suggestions on how I could improve for next time.

Animoto

I've been a bit busy the past week or so as on top of the usual end of term assessment writing, marking and reports, I have been preparing for my first PD presentation. As part of the preparation for that presentation I have begun to use Animoto more in class and have prepared a short video to highlight what it is. Animoto is great for putting short videos together and even better if you grab an educator account as it allows you and your students to make longer videos with images, text and audio. Simple to use but effective. Students can include the target language in written or spoken form in their movies. Here's the one I prepared earlier ...

Screencasting & language learning

I've been checking out Capture Fox - a Firefox add-on that I originally came across thanks to the the Ed Tech Crew Podcast. Capture Fox allows you to very easily make a screencast in Mozilla (though only in Windows XP & Vista). Once installed, you're only a couple of clicks away from recording (with voice if you choose) what you are doing in the firefox screen or in the whole window - at this stage you can't reduce the size of the area. The only problem I've found so far is the size of the screencast files, though you can choose to lower the quality and reduce the size.

Anyway, today's brainwave centred around using the add-on to help engage my students in a bit of language learning through some "Virtual ordering at a restaurant". The plan at this stage goes a little like this ...

After installing the add-on in firefox and learning how to use it we will:

1. Go to the McDonalds website in Japan to have a look at the menu - practising some katakana script while we are there.
   
• On second thoughts, I will use 3 or 4 different restaurant / food outlet sites rather than all using the same site. My personal favourite Mister Donuts will no doubt make it onto the list.
  
2. Students will write down what they'd like to order, again ensuring they use the correct script. They will need to order more than 1 of each item to practice using the correct counter (our latest grammar point).
   
3. Finally students will use capture fox to create a screencast of themselves ordering their chosen food and drink (in Japanese of course). We will then share our creations.
   

I may need to refine the plan a little but it's a start. Could screencasts like this one day constitute a speaking assessment, or am I taking things too far with that idea? Short of skyping a restaurant in Japan (hmmm... maybe one day), this seems to be the next best thing. On face value it seems like a reasonable attempt to make Japanese more relevant to the students by showing them how they can use their knowledge to order food from a real menu, but we shall see...

Check out my attempt at the task below: