In the summer term the St Bart’s MFL faculty were approached to help set up languages lessons online with the Oak National Academy.
Some parents and carers may recognise the name as it has been at the forefront of “lockdown” educational provision in both the primary and secondary sectors. Funded by the government, its aims were to have the majority of the National Curriculum online by September in readiness for another “lockdown” or indeed to help in the situation of teachers or students having to self-isolate at home. The lessons are ideal as they can be accessed easily by students at home and the students are taken through the learning objective by the teacher, with pause points to complete activities, just like they would do in a classroom. Indeed the lessons could also be shown in school, should a teacher be unable to work and a subject specialist not be available.
Some of the MFL teachers have been working closely with NCELP (the National Centre for Excellence in Language Pedagogy) and were thus greatly honoured to have been selected to teach languages on a national scale, whilst being mentored by some of the leaders in language teaching in the country.
Mrs Clare, Mrs Sheikh, Mrs Hedley-Smith (all delivering French), Mrs Johnson (German), and Miss Brown (Spanish) became stars of the camera, as after designing the lesson content, preparing the activities and accompanying slides, they then had to film themselves teaching the lesson, edit the videos and embed them into their slide presentations. The whole project proved to be an intense learning experience for the teachers themselves, having to adapt their teaching style to meet NCELP standards as well as mastering all the technology. Their lessons are now live on the Oak website, proudly representing St Bart’s!
