Videos

• Print

Videos

Why more Irish students should be studying Italian

• Print

Why more Irish students should be studying Italian

• Italian is a significant language. There is a tendency to see Italian as a language you learn for fun - ask people who speak a few languages why they learned Italian... they'll tell you how much fun it is, how beautiful the language is, you'll hear about the art and the fashion and the opera... then there are the Italians who will tell us it came before French and being the closest language to Latin makes it superior, that back in the Middle Ages anyone who was educated had to be able to speak Italian... these are potentially all legitimate reasons for learning Italian but there are other reasons why we need to be offering more Italian.
• Italy is the 4^th largest economy in Europe, it has the same economic output as France or the UK.  If you look at last year's trade figures on this 2012 CSO trade report, the value of exports from Ireland to Italy was 2,828 million euro, that’s more than the value of exports to China, it’s half the value of exports to Germany, it’s 2/3 the value of exports to France. Italy is also the 3rd largest importer of Irish beef.
• The number of native speakers of Italian is not far behind the number of native speakers of French – it’s estimated that there are about 68 million native speakers of French but there are 62 million of Italian and there are large communities of Italian speakers across the world. For example, 1.5 million in Brazil, another 1.5 million in Argentina, 1 million in the US, another million between Canada and the UK.
• There are plenty of well-qualified teachers in Ireland because we have well-developed third level provision, with appropriate avenues for teacher qualification.
• We have excellent resources and materials for teaching Italian including the new textbook In bocca al lupo! for Senior Cycle, Giro d’Italia for Junior Cycle, and resources available on this website.
• In the Leaving Certificate examinations in 2010, there was one candidate of Italian for every 87 candidates of French which is an imbalance, not only in the context of encouraging linguistic diversity, and championing plurilingualism, but also in terms of the economic importance of Italy to Ireland.  Historically, French has been important for many reasons but at a conservative estimate a more realistic balance should be in the order of 10 students of French for every student of Italian.  This would no doubt result in an increase in opportunities for trade and exchange with Italy.

Lo shampoo

• Print

Latest featured resource: Lo shampoo

Glogster

• Print

Glogster

Glogster is a social network that allows users to create free interactive posters, or glogs. Glogster was founded in 2007. Currently this social network has hundreds of thousands registered users.

Glogster provides an environment to design interactive posters. The user inserts text, images, photos, audio, videos, special effects and other elements into their glogs to generate a multimedia online creation.

The growing popularity of Glogster helped spawn Glogster EDU to assist teachers in providing dynamic and interactive teaching experiences. The EDU Glogster project is intended primarily for pupils and teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Teachers privately register their students and may create a safe virtual class with as many as two hundred students. Teaching glogs are private and are made accessible to others at the discretion of the teacher.

See here for DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO USE GLOGSTER EDU