This week Radio Lingua Schools has been working with 15-16 year old students from across Scotland at the S@S Accelerate programme, part of the Strathclyde University’s Innovative Routes to Learning project. The participating students signed up for a week of language-learning activities and over the past few days have taken part in challenges and debates, learned some Italian, Japanese and Zulu, and have created multilingual radio shows in French, German and Spanish.

The students have learned how to produce podcasts using GarageBand, recording their voices, applying filters and adding jingles and sound effects. They’ve had the opportunity to practise their language skills and increase their confidence in speaking. Their podcasts can be downloaded from the links below.

Group 1 – download mp3

An celebrity chat show featuring interviews with Audrey Tautou in French and Antonio Banderas in Spanish.

Group 2 - download mp3

Comparing the relative benefits of holidaying in Madrid or Paris.

Group 3 - download mp3

Strathclyde University Radio interviews with language students about their experiences working and studying abroad.

Group 4 - download mp3

Agony Aunt Tía Dolores solves callers’ problems in a phone-in radio show.

Well done to all the students who have taken part!

In the early stages of learning a language, learners have a limited range of vocabulary and it’s often difficult to find interesting and motivating ways to practise the few words and phrases they have learned. This was exactly the experience of teachers in St Mark’s, Irvine, and Radio Lingua Schools designed a workshop around providing an additional mode of practice for a group of primary 6 pupils who had just started learning Spanish.

The pupils participating in the workshop only had three Spanish lessons prior to taking part, but in this time they had managed to cover greetings, asking each other ¿cómo te llamas? (what is your name?) and dealing with ages. The workshop aimed to provide an additional opportunity to practise key words and phrases at this early stage of learning.

The first stage of the workshop involved the pupils working with Garageband on a file which included the various parts of a conversation, muddled up. This file had been prepared prior to the workshop, simply recording two voices on two different tracks of Garageband. The same process can easily be achieved in Audacity or other audio editors.

The pupils had to rearrange the recorded ‘regions’ on separate tracks of the Garageband file, making up a conversation between “Carlos” and “Isabel”. The pupils understood the words and phrases contained in the conversation immediately, so rearranging the phrases to make the correct conversation was a straightforward task.

Having completely rearranged the conversation, each pair played their audio file to the rest of the group. They then had to record their own version of the conversation, taking on the roles of “Carlos” and “Isabel” themselves and using the Vocal Transformer plugin in Garageband to make one voice in each group sound a bit more masculine!

The podcasts recorded by each pair can be found below. Just a reminder that in each case one of the voices has a Vocal Transformer filter applied!

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

This workshop will feature in a forthcoming episode of the Apple Distinguished Educator Learning Series, The Creative Classroom, which will feature ideas and tips for using iLife and iWork in the classroom. More information will be made available in the coming weeks.