As we have begun Year 11 with our second cohort of students who will negotiate the hopefully shortlived scenario of controlled assessment, we are now in the position to be able to learn from last year and reflect on how to get the best work out of our students.

Controlled Assessment in MFL, most particularly in writing, is as much a test of memorisation and work ethic as skill, talent or linguistic flair. To be successful, students put together and learn by heart 300 words of higher-tier level crafted text following work in class and preparation at home (best case scenario). Or on the bus on the way to school. Or they turn up with a nervous smile and a tatty vocab list and hope for the best.

Hours are spent by teachers scaffolding adaptable high-scoring phrases, demonstrating snazzy compound-clause sentences and gleefully recounting how yes, if you write this it will *definitely* help you get an A*.

So, we ask ourselves with our heads in our hands, why do too many our students wilfully ignore all our advice, refuse to use the phrases they have been given and strike out wildly on their own with only the dictionary and a highly questionable grasp of the perfect tense to help them through? Especially the ones who most need our help?

Reflection #1

Students are fundamentally uneasy about adapting language we as teachers give them for an assessed piece. There is a problem of ownership. Some even seem to think it might almost be cheating to just 'use stuff off the vocab sheet'. Aiming to please but misguidedly thinking they have to somehow go back to the beginning to do so, they start their preparation with their books closed and hope for the best. Rare is the student who without prompting will properly and thoroughly use resources, books and reference materials to even half their fullest potential to produce a high level piece of work. Why?

Reflection #2

Controlled assessment, despite its attempts at becoming a normal part of classroom routine, is highly stressful for a lot of students. When under pressure, many students will revert to their linguistic comfort zone, which for many is about the mid-point of Year 8 before life got too complicated and full of tenses and agreements. This becomes very obvious if the focus of CA is something like school or holidays: topics they have revisited ad nauseam since early KS3. In adversity, students will instinctively rootle around in their memories for old trusted basics rather than be brave and use the relatively new language they built onto the topic when it was revisited in KS4.

We see strong evidence of this the minute we give students a CA task using material that they didn't study at KS3 at all. Performance in CA on the Environment last year was consistently higher from our students than on more supposedly accessible topics because the candidates didn't have a Year 8 comfort zone to refer to: they had never covered the topic before. They really used a significant number of higher level constructions and many had a much more impressive range of vocabulary and structures than in their other pieces.

What now?

I am pushing this year for us to take this approach to all CA tasks in the department. We do the students a disservice by making the bullet points too apparently straightforward as the natural response doesn't build in enough of the higher-level language they need to perform at the top level. If we push them hard in the bullet points to write maturely and with complexity rather than sink into the comfortable illusion that simplicity is the safe option, I believe we will see a much stronger performance across the board.

I will admit that until last summer I was an Evernote sceptic. The app had languished unused on my various Apple devices and it wasn't until this autumn that I began to appreciate the power of this tool.

I had spent last year trying to escape the chaos of multiple paper and electronic systems by using standalone teachers' planner applications on my iPad. I stuck with Planbook for some time, finding it worked well in isolation but didn't mesh at all well with other digital resources and I found switching back and forth to my calandar frustratingly clunky.

Enter Evernote. It is an online synch-able productivity tool that helps capture and store  everything from webclips and images to text and audio. If you are on the road to GTD nirvana, Evernote certainly helps with the capture stage. In terms of word-processing power it is very basic indeed, but the structure of notebooks worked perfectly for the setup I was after. Even bigger bonus: admin rights weren't needed on my  PC at school to install the application on my desktop. I set up a notebook for each class I teach in the first instance. I also have the Evernote app installed on my iPhone and iPad.

In MS Word (we are at school after all...!) I set up a simple collection of weekly template grids to act as the framework for my planning. Each one has a space for the learning activities, homework and any reminders for each week. It's not fancy: the aim for me was at-a-glance simplicity. Life is too short for filling in endless boxes for the sake of it! Since you can't make or alter grids in Evernote so after a little trial and error copying across from Word I had a simple format that worked pretty well.

I used a simple block of colour to remind me when homework needs setting. One of my personal goals for the year had been to prioritise the setting of higher quality and more engaging homeworks and putting this front-and-centre in the planning process has certainly helped.

After 6 weeks of running this system I would never go back to a paper planner, or an isolated planning app. I love that for my Year 13, web research can easily be captured with the Evernote web clipping tool. Quickly dropping images into a new note was invaluable when I was working on Vichy propaganda with them, and after looking at the images together on the board, I was two clicks away from emailing the note directly to my students. Simple and seamless. I can add screenshots from my IWB, photos, scribbles... anything!

Having weekly plans like this is conducive to good organisation too: I aim to have my whole week planned out and resourced by the preceding Thursday afternoon. It makes me think more holistically about how one lesson seams into another. If everything doesn't get covered, I just select and drag to move text between sections of the grid.

I've taken it a step further by adding reference materials and handy aide-memoires to my notebooks too, including copies of our programmes of study and a record of exactly when each set of books has been marked.

I love that I can access and edit all my plans from *anywhere* thanks to my iPhone. Evernote has now found its way into my holy trinity of productivity along with Todo/Toodledo and Google Calendar.

I am looking forward to taking this to the next level, adding further evidence from student work and making it a professional archive / portfolio for clippings of good practice. I'd like to convert some members of my team so when we share parallel classes we could plan collaboratively using Evernote.

How are you using Evernote in school?

If teacher colleagues need support in getting signed up and started on Twitter, let David Miller guide them with the help of Miss Jean Brodie in this fantastic series of videos.

http://www.vimeo.com/29474310

http://www.vimeo.com/29474626

http://www.vimeo.com/29474883

Thank you for the mention David!

The other week I asked for some volunteers from my Year 8  group to come and have a look at the new ASUS Eee-Pad Transformer and tell me what they thought of it. Thrilled with the idea of offering their expert opinions, they turned up at lunchtime full of enthusiasm and curiousity.

Firstly I showed them the tablet and they quickly worked out how the dock works. Initial Ooohs and Aaaahs about the coolness of having something that was both tabletty and netbooky led on to concern about the robustness of the hinge mechanism in a classroom environment.

They then looked at the interface, speed and resposiveness. They liked the feel of the tablet and thought it was pretty quick until we got the iPad out and put them side by side. Then, it looked remarkably sluggish by comparison. We played Angry Birds side by side with the iPad to see how the same game felt on the two tablets and whilst the boys liked the wide-screen feel, it was difficult for them with child-sized hands to manage the tablet without a cover or stand. They were forced to hold it in portrait mode rather than landscape, therefore losing all the widescreen benefits.

Interestingly they felt that overall, the  ASUS had a lot going for it. The students could see themselves using a device like it in lessons as having the dock made it seem more like a workhorse than its more playful rival from Apple.

Like me, they were worried about battery life and speed: two areas where I worry that the ASUS doesn't deliver. It's such a shame, as I said to a colleague on Twitter: I really wanted this tablet to be a real contender for the education market. I'm not yet convinced it is!

PS. If you want to win an ASUS Transformer for yourself, all you have to do to enter the competition is go over to http://techinstyle.tv/ and comment on one of the blog posts reviewing them!

Instructions? Whatever.

I don't read instructions for kit any more. Any gadget I buy or even try, I expect to be so intuitive that for the general functions I shouldn't need to squint through flapping bits of paper in eight languages to get it moving. I'm pleased to report that the ASUS didn't disappoint. I had it up and running in no time, connecting with ease to my home wifi. And the best thing? I didn't have to plug it into anything. No fiddling around with passwords and iTunes. No obligatory syncing with the mothership! Yay!

I still haven't plugged it physically into anything apart from the mains to charge it and am happily getting everything I need from the cloud. Result.

Android 3.0 Honeycomb

The little guy had a big responsibility here given that this was my first proper Android experience. I've never even owned an Android device and so was cautious about how easy adapting would be.  The whole thing was incredibly painless. Downloading apps from the Marketplace is a pleasure, especially when so much is free! The ASUS is very quick to respond and pretty agile switching between apps. It's pretty, moves fluidly and the touch interface has all the sensitivity I hoped for.

Handling

The Asus is a slightly odd shape. It's long and thin, making its proportions more comfortable to manipulate and hold in a 'landscape' rather than 'portrait' position. It's a nice weight but not as light as I had expected, being of a more plastic construction than the iPad. Typing feels comfortable, especially thanks to the joys of a proper keyboard layout significantly superior to the iPad which includes numbers in the default keyboard. No shift or toggle required! Simple things like that are so pleasing when entering passwords, addresses and all those really ordinary bits of data that become that bit less of a palaver.

What's next?

What the Year 8s think. They take no prisoners when it comes to gadgetry so this should be interesting!

It's no secret with my students that I like it when they use digital media to make learning more interesting. Anything that helps grammar rules to stick is a good idea in my view, so I was really pleased when one of my Year 10 students made this video about the Perfect Tense in French.

http://youtu.be/CyAuW0pPOhM

First look

The nice people at ASUS have sent me their latest baby: the Eee Pad Transformer, to have a play with.

I'll be running a series of blog posts over the coming weeks as I get to know it, with the particular aim of establishing whether it is a contender to the iPad 2 in an educational context.

I will share side-by-side comparisons of some of the issues I think this tablet has to overcome in the classroom compared to an iPad and putting the ASUS into the hands of my trusty Year 8 volunteers to get their view.

So what is it?

Here's the fast and dirty tour from Mashable:

and a more detailed walk-through with a full spec rundown:

Is it a bird...? Is it a plane...?

A bit like the Mashable lady, I wondered as I unboxed the Transformer how it would define itself. Is it a tablet with a nifty dock? Or a netbook with a detachable touchscreeny tabletty-bit? Having had it up and running for a few days it is definitely playing out for me personally as a tablet that can change up a gear into workhorse mode when serious inputting needs to be done; happily existing independently of its keyboard. The double battery life you get from docking the tab certainly helps, but like an eejit it did take me a while to get the hang of charging the two units (together? separately? ummm....)

Unbox me, baby

I am an Apple fan. My first iPhone led to a MacBook, which led to another iPhone, several iPod variants... and most recently an iPad. I have become used to the bated breath and growing excitement that comes with the unveiling of lovely Apple kit, where the unboxing is designed to make you fall unashamedly in love with your new purchase and justify with ease the amount of money you've spent on it.

It was always going to be tough for a competitor to beat that first flush of joy, so well done to ASUS for doing a fine job. They haven't tried to do their own thing: unboxing the Transformer was remarkably like opening an Apple product, only slightly cheaper feeling and with naff typefaces. Sorry guys, but well done. Kind of.

If you want to see a joyful fellow opening his with a VERY large kitchen knife, here you go:

Next time

Set-up, syncing, connectivity and ergonomics. Gosh that all sounds very grown-up.

I love this video produced by one of our Year 10 boys here at Berkhamsted. He's clearly put a lot of thought and effort into planning it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=637J02z-Rxo

If you enjoyed that, you'll love our Year 12 French student Alison's animation about the film 'Romuald et Juliette':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYdkEvV26BQ

This document, '21 steps to 1-1 success' really helps to get to grips with the process of equipping students in classrooms with 1-1 devices. It charts the entire process in a practical, reasoned and evaluative way. Goodbye headline-friendly fluff, hello substance!

Thanks to Victoria State Government for publishing it.

I watched this video with interest, hoping for a real insight into how this school in Singapore has gone about waving goodbye to textbooks and making a leap into a new era with the use of iPads for students.

I certainly admire the sentiment, but am unclear about the quality of input and how the content previously delivered in books has been replaced. There are several slightly concerning messages here too.

Are the students on task? How is this being managed? How good is the productive work they are doing now it is digital? Yes, the school is moving with the times, but where is the evidence that it's better for learning?