Invitation: language teachers

If you are part of a language project (or have already completed one) then please get on board and start clustering your results with other language teaching projects. Through cooperation we can reach out to our end users and thus cause a significant impact. By sharing information and results we avoid reinventing the wheel.

TOOLS (Tools for CLIL Language Teachers) is an EC co-funded project developing a free online tool to support CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), but the partnership also seeks to cluster with other language projects.

Let the tools & pools website serve as a link to your results. From the website you also have access to copyleft language teaching tools, videos, materials, and methods manuals that you may use and even include in your own projects.

Hop on board and join the tools and pools teams e-mail: ka@sde.dk.

You are also invited to share your ideas in our tools4clil  Facebook and Linkedin or Tweet/follow tools4clil on Twitter.

First Experiments

The project is working with eight different languages primarily, but the “clilstore” tool that is being developed enables access to dictionaries in over 100 languages.

Here are some of our first attempts.

Click on the screenshot below to access a Danish video and transcript. You can click on any word in the transcript that you don’t know. The right panel will open up to display a choice of languages and dictionaries at the top.  Click on the one you want, and a dictionary entry in your chosen language will appear below.

Here’s another example with Scottish Gaelic as the source language. (Notice that the clilstore facility also offers the page creator the option of adding links at the bottom of the page. This could be to a suite of Hot Potatoes exercises, as in the Danish example, or to any other webpage, such as a related blogpost.)

And the project is not restricted to European languages that use the Roman alphabet. Here’s an example using Arabic.

These are first attempts using the basic prototype. Over the duration of the project we will refine and develop the tool in the light of experience and testing with both teachers and learners. Comments are always welcome.

New blog for TOOLS project

This is the last working day of the kick-off meeting for the new TOOLS Project. It’s also the first day of this blog. We aim to post some examples of good materials here.