Sitting by the huge original fireplace in the historic Nunton House – on a dark and stormy night – Colm shares his childhood memories of what Scottish Gaels would call “Oidhche Shamhna” with Malachy.

The two of them are conversing in Irish. This would ordinarily be quite a challenge for Scottish Gaelic speakers, but help is at hand – through Clilstore!

Our Irish visitors have been very quick learners, not only recording, editing, and uploading fresh video, but also supplying a transcript and placing it on the Clilstore platform. This will allow speakers of Scottish Gaelic, and other languages, to read as they listen, and check any words they don’t know in an online dictionary at the click of a mouse. Try it out – Clilstore Unit 2355.

Island Voices was born out of the involvement of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in the original 2005-2007 POOLS project. SMO has continued to maintain an outward-looking European perspective ever since, and is now leading the POOLS-3 “Transfer of Innovation” project which sees POOLS outputs and ways of working being taken forward in three new languages – Irish, Catalan, and Czech.

But it’s a two-way process, in which new partners also bring fresh skills and knowledge to the table for sharing. The Pelican School in Brno has introduced “green screen” techniques into its video-making repertoire, and describes the process in this POOLS-3 blog post.

For anyone interested in “endangered languages” Czech offers an interesting historical contrast to the usual pessimistic trajectory. Wikipedia supplies this basic introduction to the language and its history. Our colleagues may have more to teach Gaelic enthusiasts than video techniques!

In any event, they clearly enjoyed the video-making process! Here’s an example:

You can find the full set of POOLS-3 Czech videos via this link.