The Learning Outcomes Framework allows teachers to select the best possible resources for their students, ensuring that all can reach the learning outcomes in some way or another. The Secretariat for Catholic Education believes that when teachers come together and work on common goals they feel supported and grow professionally. Last June, during a CoPE session at St Aloysius College, teachers of French in Church schools, gave their feedback on the new learning outcomes for year 8 and discussed how they could teach and assess these outcomes. In the second part of this COPE session, teachers worked together in groups to produce interactive exercises for the four language skills: listening, reading, writing and speaking. Ms Roberta Trapani Maggi, Digital Literacy support teacher, guided the participants in using the necessary digital tools especially apps and resources like canva for the production of creative writing tasks, Balabolka as a speech converter program for the Listening tasks as well as apps for vocabulary enrichment. All the tasks that were produced during the Workshop were then uploaded on the website https://flecuria.wordpress.com/lofs-2/
Technology and music are two winning keys in a language classroom since they both fully engage the students. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner recognizes musical intelligence as one of the multiple intelligences. People who have strong musical intelligence are good at thinking in patterns, rhythms, and sounds. Many educators find that students enjoy singing and besides, listening to songs in a foreign language enhance their memory to remember new vocabulary. During a COPE session in November, teachers explored how to exploit this innovative pedagogical tool for the teaching of French as a foreign language. Teachers benefited from two sessions and took part in workshops on how to use songs in a playful way so as to ensure fun and learning concomitantly. These workshops were conducted by the composer of Chansons sans Frontières: Mme Marie Courtois Prieto and one of the editors of Hachette, Mme Hélène Tremblay.
