Mon inspiration!

     Marie-France Perkins. What a great lady. Have you ever met someone, virtually or in real life, and wonder what you would have done without meeting them? Immediately, they captivate and inspire you, and definitely make you smile. This is how I feel about Marie-France Perkins and with a bit more time of researching her and practicing her methods, I thing these feelings will grow stronger! This is what she looks like, the lovely lady I can not get enough of:

     Initially, I was captivated by her blog because it began all in French. I felt as if this was a secret world that only people with the skills to enter it and gain knowledge from it were allowed into. Without trying to sound like a self-absorbed Frenchie, it excited me. Delving deeper into it I wanted to find out more about her. Because I could not find this information on her blog, I had to do some research.

      From her twitter page, (https://twitter.com/MarieFrance) I can see that she is a the head of an MFL school in the beautiful city of Bath (England I believe) who loves teaching and ICT. If you're anything like me, you get stressed out from acronyms you are not familiar with. I, as a French major, could guess that MFL means Modern Foreign Languages. I was lost at ICT, though. It turns out, it means Information and Communications Technologies - which makes sense since she is a blogger. Reading her lessons, I was interested to see if she had any videos of her using them. Unsurprisingly, for me at least since she is a lover of ICT, I found her youtube account. She has six videos and all of them look as if they were filmed within 1 second of each other and capture the same thing:

    While these adorable videos of a new litter of puppies was anything but disappointing, it was not what I was looking for. Additionally, mademoiselle Perkins also has accounts on LinkedIn, PodOmatic, Pinterest, Diigo, Slideshare, Classroom 2.0, Prezi, Docstoc, and three additional blogs (Amazing how much you can find out about someone on the internet, right?) 

    Down to the nitty gritty - her blog. It is extremely interesting and insightful. She provides resources to teachers that are categorized so one can find exactly what they need. She has been blogging at this site since October 2007 and continues to blog regularly. Her most recent blog post is about Mr. Bean, who was one of my favorite characters from French videos in high school. It is a silent clip that I would find somewhat difficult to incorporate into a lesson without her advice. 

     I think this video is perfect for students because it is hilarious. Mlle Perkins suggests having students try to decipher verbs like to go, to take, to cut, to put butter on, to open, etc. by watching the clip. She has a sample worksheet to go with it to help structure their thoughts. Additionally, I am enthralled with her next blog post which involves students creating their own videos online and recording voice-overs to demonstrate their french speaking abilities. I love this because I can tell she is spreading her love of technology over to her students. Additionally, this allows her to assess their speaking abilities without putting them on the spot and also while giving them time to revise/edit their clips. 

     In a more general sense, this blog is extremely useful because of the links on either side of it. She has categories on the right side, such as "music," "food," and "film" that will take you to a page with all of the blog posts she has completed on those topics. You can also select them by grade. Below this, she has podcasts where someone can listen to her instruct a lesson. Below this she has vocab words that can be pronounced in a language of your choice by the computer while the spelling appears in front of you. On the left side of her blog, she includes links to other sites that may help you for various reasons. She also has the option to translate her blog into a different language so that it is accessible to more people. In terms of her current audience, the UK has the most viewers followed by the US and then by France. 

     I am so glad I had the chance to review her blog because I feel that it may really come in handy to me in the future. I was so sad when I realized world languages were not accessible of goorulearning but now I have a site that will provide me with the same experience!

     If you are interesting in World Languages, or specifically, le francais, check out her blog here. I had a great time learning from her and hope you will too!