Idahosa raps in 8 languages

And I thought I was passionate about languages!

Have you seen this young man? 

Alex Rawlings, a second-year student reading German and Russian won a national competition in the UK to find its most multilingual student. He is 20 years old, a student at Oxford University and speaks 11 languages! I don't know to what extent he speaks each and every one of them, but from this sample of his abilities, he sounds amazing, at least in the languages that I am familiar with. 

Publisher Harper Collins bestowed the title on Rawlings as part of a nationwide search they launched last June in promotion of their new language and learning courses, according to the company's website.

I showed this to my Grade 9 French class today who were whining about revision of regular present tense verbs and not being able to remember the endings. 

Click on the image to watch the video from the BBC News website.

Infographics- have you ever seen one?

Visually, I find infographics fascinating. There are so many out there on every topic you can imagine. Now it's time to explore the possibility of using them in my classroom. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that the project my kids do on a Spanish speaking country can be done via infographic...I will have to look into it.
Here's one for you (from Voxy, but found on this site) on what the most difficult language to learn is for native English speakers.
Romance languages are deemed to be “easy,” since there are so many similarities to English, amongst the "hard" category are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean and on the "medium" list is Russian. Now, I took a Russian course for one semester at the London School of Economics, I speak English, French, Spanish and Romanian fluently, I studied German for 7 years, albeit from Grade 5 until the end of Grade 13, and Russian was most definitely hard for me. The grammar structures brought back memories of German class. Bottom line is, Russian class was hard. I don't think anyone would classify it as a "medium".

Bienvenue! ¡Bienvenidos! Wilkommen! Bine ati venit!

Welcome to the Learning to Teach & Teaching to Learn blog. The goal of this blog is to keep an account of mainly technology related resources that I use to teach French and Spanish or that other amazing teachers have created, and to show you that you do not have to be a computer geek to be able to use technology in your class!

I am a French and Spanish high school teacher with a love for languages, technology and my students. I am constantly trying to learn new ways to improve my teaching and thus far, the incorporation of technology into my lessons has had a very positive effect. As a result, I am always looking for new and exciting ways to use it to teach.

I have come across many amazing teachers and am learning so much from all of their hard work, so I will share what I find from others, as well as developing my own resources and trying to provide ideas on how to make technology more accessible to you and to your classes.

I have tried to document this before and did not get past a few posts so here I am again. I will be attempting to make regular contributions to the blog when I am not teaching or taking care of my 13 month old. The first few posts are copied over from my previous blog.

I hope you enjoy and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to get in touch and contribute!

Happy teaching!