Have you heared about MYLO? See this link for School Teacher information. It is a government sponsored initiative to bring the "real world" back into the classroom making languages relevant and engaging for 11-16 year olds, and it's free! Having been to a meeting back in February at CILT (the National Centre for Languages) I was given a taster and the concept is an exciting one. What will learners do? The website above states: "MYLO is organised into a series of challenges. Each challenge is designed to offer a fully-rounded and self-contained learning experience, promoting language learning through creativity, problem-solving, decision-making and enquiry." These challenges have the potential to be very engaging as the innovative use of "best breed technologies and interactive routes to learning" culminate in "a social approach to learning and creative output". This embraces the rise of the "digital world",(even the PM is delivering speeches entitled: "Building Britain's Digital Future"), and how education is moving with the times.
MYLO is marketed as "Engaging, Valuable, Creative, Real-Life, Flexible, Innovative, Complementary and Evolving". Reading futher into the justifications for these descriptive words provides a sense of a well planned and conscientiously put together educational tool. My fellow MYLO Ambassadors (links to follow...) and I were given the opportunity to meet the designers from Lightbox Education and to feedback both positive and constructive comments as to its design, potential for implementation and impact on learning. This brought alive the concept of MYLO's "evolving" nature as they welcome feedback from both learners and teachers as the project develops. I, for one, am looking forward to putting MYLO through it's paces in the classroom in the near future and will feedback on how my classes gained from the "stimulating content" and "innovative online environment", along with any reflective feedback in terms of any improvements that could be made if there are any to be found. I am eager to put into practice the different stages of the MYLO learning journey: Meet the contact, Get the skills, Compete, Take the challenge and Review my work, and to see the process through from beginning to end and how the students react to it's imaginative link to the real world via new technologies.
On y va!
