Joe Dale is a full-time French teacher and is ICT literate in generic applications such as MS Word, MS Publisher and MS PowerPoint as well as various MFL specific software. He has created many ICT based exercises in line with the QCA scheme of work, including Hot Potatoes, Hangman, Fun with Texts, Spellmaster, Linguamate and TaskMagic activities.
His hours of hard work have resulted in his school, to the best of his knowledge, having the best ICT resources for MFL on the whole of the Isle of Wight. In addition to these customised exercises, he also uses a selection of freeware from France for such topics as number practice and recognition of countries in Europe as well as commercial CDroms such as Houlala, Pilote 1 and 2, Essential French, French Expressions, Talk Now! and Départ. The school has also recently purchased Métro Électro with its e-learning credits.
ICT is used across the department and Joe has helped colleagues in appropriately integrating ICT into the scheme of work. He has also closely followed various trends in the development if ICT in MFL by being a member of such discussion lists as the Linguanet Forum, MFLresources and the TES staffroom.
Having already provided training on behalf of his school and LEA, Joe branched out this year and lead a whole day CPD course at Windlesham House School in West Sussex. He also spoke at the Linguascope Conference in June where he was asked to become a toolkit author for The Specialist School Trust at Warwick University in September. He also recently become a member of the special interest group for ICT at the Association for Language Learning. In addition he has become a Dragonfly trainer and will be running a course called 'Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom' in March and July.
He feels that the use of ICT in French has greatly helped pupils across the ability range. They are motivated by ICT and enjoy using the school’s computer networks and the interactive whiteboard. Through their own testimonies, ICT has helped their word recognition, spelling, understanding of word order/sentence structure and general grammar awareness.
As a teacher and trainer, he is keen to gain a comprehensive overview of how ICT can be integrated practically and effectively into the MFL classroom for the benefit of all. For this reason, he wants to join the International Education Forum.
