The Language Superhighway: Dodgy Sat Navs and Sausage Rolls
My name is Ollie Gargrave and I am the Midlands and North Regional Representative at thisislanguage.com. A few weeks ago Victoria Mitchell at the Association for Language Learning asked me if I could write a blog-post about my experiences attending some of the latest language events in my region as she thought it would be a good idea to show language teachers what life’s like on the other side of the exhibitor booth!
For those of you who don’t know thisislanguage.com, we make authentic online language resources for schools and have over 5000 videos in French, German and Spanish. We’re an innovative, growing company and one of the fun parts of my job is travelling around my region (which stretches from Birmingham to Newcastle) visiting TIL schools to listen to our clients and give training sessions and presenting TIL to new schools at all the great TeachMeets and conferences organised by ALL.
The first summer event I presented at was a TeachMeet at St Peter’s School in York. Talks touched upon topics such as using technology in the classroom and the different ways to learn a language. The event was expertly put together by Lauren Crawley, who is a teacher at the school and who will hopefully make this a feature for several more years as I think everyone came away from the evening feeling that it had been a very useful and fun event. Two highlights that stand out in the mind from this event were the delicious sausage-rolls that we were given and the after-event drinks which took place in the local pub!
The next event I attended was a day at Newcastle High School for Girls which was superbly run by Jennie King. I was given the opportunity to present TIL to a group of around 40 teachers and take some questions on various aspects of the website. This was a fantastic opportunity to listen to teachers’ needs and point out the ways that thisislanguage.com can help save them time and improve student engagement. The event was part of ALL’s ‘Super Saturday’ with MFL events going on in several different parts of the country, some of which were attended by my colleagues. It was a great day but one of the take away memories of the event was a gruelling 7 hour drive up to Newcastle on the Friday night. It was a major test of concentration, determination and sheer willingness to see the journey through, not to mention my Mini’s ability to handle a long drive. The success of the next day’s meeting and the hospitality of Newcastle High School for Girls made it worth every minute of the previous afternoon and this was helped out by the beautiful weather we had over the two days.
The following week I was up at an ALL-organised seminar run by the ALL Yorkshire Branch at Sheffield Hallam University. This time, I took the train! Eva Lamb (Yorkshire Branch leader) had arranged for a range of speakers including Martine Pillette and Lisa Probert to talk about accelerating progress through the Key Stages and this was another fantastic opportunity to showcase our authentic language resources and to be involved in what was a very entertaining day. Eva must be singled out for all the hard work she put into it and it was great to see her passion for languages shining through (not to mention her love of Musical Theatre!).
My final event of the TeachMeet ‘season’ was a conference in Liverpool at the Passion for Learning Centre on the outskirts of the city centre in a place called Hale. (I almost missed the start as my SatNav took me to Hale outside Manchester at first!) Organised by David McDermott, this was another excellent day of talks by Martine Pilette and a presentation by myself on TIL. The atmosphere was very relaxed and Martine encouraged a great deal of participation from delegates throughout the day on subjects including the new GCSE, how to come up with more spontaneous speaking exercises and meeting the challenge of authentic resources. We had some excellent food in between sessions and the atmosphere in general was very welcoming, open and relaxed. Moreover, despite some technical problems (the audio not working on a language video presentation is never a good thing!) there was a very strong uptake of trial offers from those present and some really positive feedback from existing clients of ours.
On reflection, it has been a very worthwhile and rewarding experience travelling to these events over the past month or so and I’ve loved putting some names to faces, meeting many new faces and having the chance to present our language resources to so many people. I’d like to thank ALL and all of the schools who have hosted these events and I am looking forward to attending more like them in the future.
For schools wanting to have a free two-week trial of thisislanguage.com please email Ollie Gargrave or call the thisislanguage office on 01865 579 260 and Ollie will be happy to help.
thisislanguage.com is a corporate member of ALL. Please find all of our corporate members here.