Open School for Languages : Department for Children Schools and Families

FIVE new MYLO Challenges!

We've been very busy during half term and have published FIVE new 'Challenges' on MYLO.

Alternative Paris

 

One of our first Challenges for KS4 learners.  Annabelle, a student, is looking for ideas for her new tour of Paris. She wants to create a tour that goes to alternative venues rather than the usual tourist attractions.  

The creative task for this 'Challenge' is to research some unusual locations for a tour of alternative Paris and then write descriptions of them that can be used by Annabelle, the guide. (Level 6)

For additional kudos points, learners should use a range of tenses to talk about the history of a place or what events will be on there in the future. They can also record their descriptions and practise their intonation to sound like a real tour guide. (Level 7)

 

There are two new Challenges in the German section.

Fairly Grimm pt 1

 

TV producer Hartfried Schuster has an idea for a new TV drama which is a twist on Grimm's fairy tales. It looks at the fairy tale characters ten years on from the events in the stories. He needs to sell the concept in order to get the series commissioned and so is looking for stories that will impress.

In this 'Challenge' learners need to develop a character and imagine what happened to them after their 'Grimm' experience. They should write their backstory and explain how they were affected by the experience and contrast this with their life now. (Level 4)

For additional kudos points, the learner should combine the past and present tenses into one sentence to describe their character then and now. They should also choose a range of adjectives to bring their character to life and take care with the presentation of their work as it will be used to sell the concept to the programme makers. (Level 5).  

There will be a second helping of Fairly Grimm coming soon in Fairly Grimm pt 2 a KS4 focused Challenge that will be released in the next few weeks. 

Also don't forget to watch the beautiful intro video for this 'Challenge'.   

 

Welcome to the Premier League

The coach is looking for ways to help new German players feel welcome when they come to play in England. He has hit upon the idea of a quiz night and is looking for some quiz questions about football in both England and Germany.  

Learners need to research quiz questions about the Premier league and the Bundesliga using a variety of question styles to make the quiz entertaining.  They'll also need to provide the answers! (Level 5)

For additional kudos points, the learner should use several tenses to construct questions about the history of each of the leagues and recent matches. They should also research the Bundesliga so they can create challenging questions for the players. (Level 6)

 

Dance jam

Dance jam, the first of two new Spanish Challenges, is a writing focused Challenge.  Follow X-PressOne as they choose a member of their dance crew to represent the UK in a Bboy competition in Mexico. The crew also needs help in promoting their entrant on the official website as they want to win support from the Spanish-speaking audience.

In this 'Challenge' learners choose a dancer and write a profile for them. They should describe their dance moves as well as the dancer. (Level 4)

For additional kudos points, the learner should explain why their chosen dancer is better than the rest and also how they will do in the competition. (Level 5)

 

KIDS

The KIDS charity works in Rosario in Argentina and helps street children to improve their lives. They want some help with a new Spanish section of their website, which will promote their work with children to people in Argentina. They are also looking for fund-raising ideas.

In this 'Challenge' learners create a web page for the KIDS charity to promote their work in Argentina. Learners should describe the life of the children the charity helps, before and after, they join the programme. (Level 5)

For additional kudos points, the learner should design a fundraising activity and say how they will go about it and why it is important. They could also research vocabulary of their own and include images. (Level 6)

 

 

 

What makes MYLO different?

Languages Work asked the wonderful Year 7 and Year 8 students at Weald of Kent Grammar School why they like using MYLO and we got some great responses...

“Because you have to run past people or squirt them with water balloons when you get something right or they squirt you back when you get something wrong.” - year 7 student

“At the end you get to play games and to recap all the activities you have just done.” - year 7 student

“Because you get to dress up your avatar. You want to get points so you want to do more French to get points.” - ‘doug’

“It’s better than other online sites as it looks more grown up.” - ‘fish224’

“Good drop down menus on activities to choose what you do.” - 'emmie27'

“It is a fun interactive way of learning.” - 'freckles'

“There are dictionaries to help you.” - 'redsmurf'

“If you don’t get the answer right you can try again.” - 'lizzy_x'

“It’s easy to learn through playing games.” - 'shann_x'

“You are learning by playing games so you do not actually realise that you are learning.” - 'babs'

“It makes learning languages fun and easy.” - 'annaRJ'

“It’s good to earn points and work up the league table.” - 'smiley8'

“It is fun going against friends and playing at the same time.” - 'liliP'

“You use listening, reading and writing skills.” - 'emilyK_X'

“It has your full attention.” - ‘fluff’

“There is a helpful bar with phrases at the bottom.” - 'zacquisha'

“Having your own avatar and your own points display drives you to get more.” - 'emmz'

 

Next, we asked some of the students what they would say to people who think language learning is boring...

“Languages are fun if you do it on the computer so it encourages you to learn.” - year 7 pupil

“To go on MYLO and do the games.” - year 7 pupil

“Use MYLO – because it makes learning fun.”  - bigtitch123

“Mylo would change your mind as it tests your skills through fun activities.” - 'bubblemaster13'

“Use MYLO because you can play with friends." - 'french-fries'

"Learning languages is useful everywhere and MYLO helps with that.” - 'gleegirl'

"Most people think that learning languages is boring. MYLO makes it really fun."  - 'smiley8'

Three new French challenges

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. 

More information for teachers.

Dress to impress

 

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. 

More information for teachers.

 

Life in Haiti

 

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. 

More information for teachers.

 

Basics

We have now published daily routine, family, home and leisure Basics completing the compliment for French.   

All German basics content is now live

We've added a lot more German 'Basics' content to MYLO.  Daily routine, family, home, leisure, starting a conversation, going to an internet cafe, sending messages, ordering drinks and snacks, buying clothes, getting around town and police and emergencies are all now live on the site. 

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.  

Avatar

The feature most requested by teachers, learners and language experts was the ability to personalise MYLO, to make it their own and provide feedback on progress. 

In the latest release of MYLO we have introduced the Avatar.  This allows registered learners to customise their home page and a create a character that represents them on the site.  As they develop their language skills learners earn kudos points and badges for exceptional work.  A badge could be earned for getting activities right first time or having work published by the teacher.  

The more kudos and particularly badges a learner accumulates the more they can personalise their Avatar.  They can ‘unclock’ accessories, pets, new backgrounds and so on.  As they become better in a language they earn ‘bragging rights’ as their Avatar shows their ability and status.  Learners can show off their status through their public home page, showing how many points they have and how cool their Avatar is looking. 

The Avatar also gives learners details about their learning journey. Learners can click on the Progress Details option on the Avatar to view a detailed breakdown of what they have done on MYLO.  

For each module they can see which activities have been completed, how many points scored and if there is more work to be done.  

Useful links

How does MYLO reward my progress? 

Getting started with MYLO

 

MYLO challenges

MYLO is structured as Challenges and Basics activities.  In this post I'm going to talk about the Challenges. Challenges allow learners to practice their productive skills by preparing a response in the target language to a request for help. Responses can be either written or spoken.

When we started developing MYLO we spoke to lots of language learners. Two messages came through clearly, that learners wanted to be creative with their language and that they wanted activities based around topics they felt were interesting and relevant to them.  As we came up with ideas we took them out to schools and asked pupils if they liked them.  Any that didn't resonate were scratched, or re-worked.  We re-tested amended concepts to check that learners liked them.  

How are challenges structured?

Each Challenge starts with an introduction from your contact, the person who explains why your language skills are needed to help them.  Below is the intro from Swiss Bliss - a challenge that is currently under development and will be available on the site soon.    

  

To support learners in developing the language skills they need to complete the task, each 'Challenge' is accompanied by a series of preparation activities. The 'Get ready' activities introduce new language and concepts. The 'Jump in' activities show the key language being used in audio and written materials. The 'Use it' activities provide learners with an opportunity to manipulate the key language for themselves.

At the end of each block of preparation activities is a 'Compete Activity' re-enforcing the learning covered in the preparation activities.  In order to succeed in the 'Compete Activity' learners must answer questions correctly against the clock.  Kudos points are awarded for both successfully completing the preparation activities and doing well in the competitive game.    

Learners can now move onto preparing their response.  To do this they use 'MYLO Create' - MYLO's creative tool that we discussed in detail in this post.  Within MYLO Create learners are given more detail of what is needed in the task and can study audio, text or video relevant to the task.  

Support

Support is available from every screen, links at the bottom of the screen provide access to a 'Dictionary', 'Phrase Book' and cultural notes.  Learners can search the whole Dictionary or Phrase Book or browse the sections relevant to the current challenge.  In the 'Insight' section are links to learning to learn videos that illustrate key skills useful to responding to that particular Challenge. 

Reviewing work

When learners are working in a school group they can submit their responses to their teacher for review.  These will appear on the teacher's group home page when they login and the teacher can provide feedback to the learners.  Teachers can also choose to publish this work to the wider MYLO community.  Teachers can assign Challenges to learners too, learners are notified by email and the Challenge will then appear on the group home page. 

 
Useful links

Directory of MYLO Challenges.

What are Challenges? 

How are Challenges structured?

How do I manage groups? 

 

Creating with MYLO

MYLO has been designed with creativity in mind.  We want learners to make use of their productive skills as much as possible, by presenting language learning in imaginative and engaging contexts, which then have a meaningful outcome.  We want learners to appreciate the value of learning languages by seeing how these skills are relevant to their future lives.  MYLO Create, the central creative tool, is the vehicle for this experience.

 

Pictures, text and sound

Each challenge in MYLO results in a creative task, where learners are asked to solve a problem on behalf of a central character.  MYLO Create allows learners to author and record their response to the challenge, but also personalise this output by manipulating the layout and adding pictures.  They can change the background, or move and resize the content regions that they have set out.  

  

Adding new content regions is easy, you just draw them out by dragging the mouse.  Each content region can then contain a mix of pictures, text and sound.

Pictures are selected from a bank of images, but these can be supplemented with pictures found online or taken with cameras.  Once selected, the position and scale of the picture in the content region can be changed as necessary.  Some of the images have interactive sections, allowing learners to adjust the colours in order to further personalise their work. 

Following this, learners can add passages of text, using standard formatting tools for changing the font, colour, size and position.  A language-specific set of accented characters is also provided for easy integration, which is then replaced with a pin-yin entry tool for Chinese challenges.  

 

Finally, the system allows learners to record audio directly into the tool, with the resulting information captured and stored for future playback. 

This area contains a scripting tool that allows learners to plan what they are going to say before they record it.  They can then break this down into smaller sections that can be recorded in turn, possibly via a role play with a friend.

 

Thinking of something to say

Starting a piece of creative work from scratch is never easy.  MYLO helps learners by providing the key language in context, via a series of multimedia inputs, which learners can then use as inspiration for their own work.  These pieces are easy to access from within the tool, with learners being able to read transcripts and translations of the content, and copy and paste material from here into the main work area. 

In addition, the phrases, dictionary and culture notes for the challenge are always available, allowing learners to look up specific content, or find further inspiration for their work.  

Finally, a sample answer is provided, which shows the expected level of work that could be produced for a challenge.

 

Sharing with others

MYLO is designed to be a social and collaborative experience, with learners sharing their work with others and gaining inspiration from their peers.  Once a learner is happy with their work, they are able to share this with other learners in their class.   

 

To share their work learners submit it to a group that has been set up by their teacher.

Shared work is presented on the challenge home page, so that other learners in the group can browse through the projects created by their classmates.  From here, teachers have the ability to publish the best projects, which are then made available to the entire MYLO community.  

When a learner has completed their project, it can be viewed in preview mode, allowing them to show their work to others and zoom into the individual sections of pages for easy presentation on an interactive whiteboard. 

Building on these social aspects of the platform, we in the process of adding features that allow learners and teachers to give feedback on class projects that will further enhance the quality of the output created, and also deepen the learning experience for everyone that contributes.

 

MYLO challenges

Hello.  Over the coming weeks we’d like to share more of the thinking behind MYLO starting with an overview today.  MYLO sets out to provide free language learning materials for KS3 and 4, in French, German, Spanish and Mandarin.  MYLO can be used either at school or at home.   The initial set of materials focuses on Breakthrough and Preliminary levels.  Our working title for the materials aimed at Breakthrough is E-Basics.  For Preliminary and later Intermediate levels our content is focused around ‘Challenges’.  In this post we’d like to talk more about the structure of a Challenge.  

Teachers have asked for materials to show global reach of the languages and also to include elements of local culture and so each Challenge is set in a real world location.  The first Challenge, for example, is set in Montreal.  Others are in South America, Africa, the UK as well as France, Germany, Spain and China.  Each Challenge is introduced by a character that needs help with a language task.  The task itself will focus on a specific element of language.  The topics for each task have been based on themes pupils have told us interested them.  Having developed some Challenge ideas based on these themes we then took the ideas back into schools to ask the learners what they thought.  The ideas that pupils told us they liked best have then been worked up further. 

 

Each Challenge is made up of four major components:

1. an introduction - where the character asks for the learners help and gives the background to the task;

2. practice materials – to help the pupil learn the language they need for the task;

3. inputs – audio, text or video in the target language; and

4. a task – either writing or speaking requiring the pupil to demonstrate their productive skills.

The learner can choose to go directly to the task if they feel comfortable they can take it on or work through the practice materials.  These follow a common structure too: 

1. preparation activities – provide the key language (both vocabulary and key grammatical points) needed to complete the task;

2. comprehension – show the key language in context through audio, video and text-based inputs, with comprehension questions;

3. manipulation – now it’s the learners’ turn to build short chunks of the key language , focussing on important grammatical points

4. compete – finally learners can drill what they have learnt in a series of games.  They can play the games as often as they like, either against other players or the computer. 

 

To complete the task we provide an online tool.  The version we are currently testing allows the learner to layout text and images to form their response to the Challenge.   We’re going to add the ability to record voiceovers and manipulate video.  

To help the learner there is always access to a Phrasebook, Glossary and Culture Notes.  Each of these is context sensitive to the Challenge, but fully searchable .   In addition there is ‘Learning to Learn’ guidance in the form of notes on how to tackle the Challenge and videos describing key strategies for learning languages, such as techniques for memorising or how to spot patterns in a language.  

Each of the content modules is mapped to the relevant National Curriculum and Ladder level.  E-Basics material is targeted at NC levels 1-3 and the Challenges currently under development are targeted at NC levels 4-6.

Pupils give the thumbs up

We’re trying to get as much input as we can from students and teachers in the development of MYLO. We welcome your feedback and we’re always happy to answer any questions you may have. A number of schools have been involved in the initial testing of the activities and we’ve had some really great feedback so far.

Students at a school in Bradford had lots of positive things to say about some of the MYLO challenges:

 “It is very different to anything that we do in language lessons and I really like the idea.”
“I think this sounds fun and I’d love to do it in my French lesson.”
“I think this is a good way to learn other languages.”
“I think this is a great module to help students get motivated and inspired.”
“I think this is a good idea because it appeals to teenagers. It looks fun and interesting.”

In general, students seemed to be really engaged with the activities MYLO offered, with many of them emphasising how much they liked the way it enabled them to learn languages in ways that were related to ‘real life’.

Designing the learner experience

The learner experience is the at the heart of everything we do.

MYLO will provide learners with an exciting and engaging environment within which to learn a language, whether French, German, Spanish or Mandarin.  It will support learners of all abilities and encourage development and progression through interactive tasks and challenges.

We are striving to design an online resource which will set a new benchmark as to what an online learning experience should feel like.  Although predominantly a classroom resource, it is envisaged that certain aspects could be for home use also. Operating in this competitive space where other influences are continually striving for the learners’ attention, MYLO must offer an experience which the learner will find rewarding and fulfilling.