MYLO has got coverage on two influential teacher blogs in recent weeks.
First Esther Hardman of Weald of Kent Grammar School, (a Specialist Language College), posted a review on her blog Crack the code.
Whilst Valerie McIntyre, head of MFL at Blue School Wells, recently summarised her post for Merlin John on her own experiences of using MYLO in the class room on her blog Making languages matter.
There is also a double page article about MYLO in the Spring 2011 edition of Languages Today.
Keen to get the latest MYLO news? You can now become a fan of MYLO on Facebook to hear about new challenges, join in discussions, get juicy tips and updates and find out how other teachers are using MYLO. We’ll also be featuring the highest-scoring schools each week, so join us to see if you’ve been featured!
The MYLO Team are very keen to help schools get the most out of MYLO and to help you get going, we have created a ‘MYLO Quick Start Guide’ that explains how to sign in, create other teacher accounts and create groups, and what pupils will need to do to join these groups.
The MYLO Quick Start Guide is stored as a ‘pdf’ and is available to view and download here. Alternatively you can use this link, http://tinyurl.com/MYLO-QSG. If you have trouble reading this file, you may need to install Adobe reader or similar software on your computer. It is free and available to download from adobe at http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/.
There is a range of information available in the MYLO site Help section, but if you need any further assistance or advice, please contact us by sending an email to us at [email protected], completing the feedback form on the MYLO site or by contacting us on Twitter via @helloMYLO.
We have released a host of new French content. Three new French 'Challenges' as well as the remainder of the French 'Basics' content have been added to the site.
Movie poster and Dress to impress are two glamorous challenges whilst Life in Haiti focuses on the far more serious subject of the reconstruction effort following last year's earthquake.
Movie poster
Christine Leroy, a French film producer, is looking for new film ideas. She wants to create something different and exciting which will appeal to an international audience. She wants to take the idea to the 'Marché du Film' at Cannes to generate interest and potential investors. She asks the learner for ideas.
In this challenge learners produce a synopsis and poster for a new film to help promote it at Cannes. The challenge is targeted at learners working at levels 5-6 of the National Curriculum and gives them the opportunity to explain plots and character traits. To achieve the higher level learners can use the future tense to add intrigue to the plot and explain why audiences will like it. Grammatically the Challenge focuses upon connectives, reflexive verbs in present and perfect tenses and the future tense.
Dress to impress features Madame X a French fashionista with high standards and strong opinions. She is an expert in French couture fashion and runs her own influential website. She is looking for a young designer to put together a new look - something a little different. But she is hard to impress. Are your learners up to the job?
This challenge is for learners working at Levels 4-5 of the National Curriculum and explores putting together a new outfit for a young person. The imperative is used to explain step-by-step how the look is achieved. The challenge focuses on clothes, fabrics, adjectives of style and colour whilst grammatically adjectival agreement, possessive adjectives, sequencing and direct object pronouns with imperatives are all covered.
One year after the devastating Haiti earthquake this challenge follows Beth Williams, a young documentary maker, who is travelling to Haiti to make a film about the reconstruction. Beth wants a high profile French celebrity to narrate the film and the learner is asked to create a presentation explaining the situation in Haiti to encourage a celebrity to get involved.
Learners must explain what has happened in Haiti and what will be done to improve the situation. The grammar covered includes regular and irregular noun plurals, adjective plurals, modals in present and conditional tenses, the perfect tense and the use of adverbs to emphasise.
Our 'Basics' content helps learners working at levels 1-3 of the National Curriculum with the key language they need to get started. All of our 'Basics' material in German can be accessed from the summary page.