As I have explained before we have just participated in this project during the first school term because some of my students weren’t introduced in Daniels’ website. I have done a survey to the students who have participated in the project and 100% of them preferred -from all the activities we have done: participating in forums and chatting-the chatting sessions. But they also found them difficult because they didn’t know what to say and how to say it in English.

They also expressed that they love creating and writing in their own blogs and writting comments in their classmates’ blogs. So that’s what we’ve decided to do from now on. Some of them have added their Power Point presentations about the 8 Millenium Goals and some audacity recordings.

Moreover, we are also going to do some chatting sessions in our own Moodle, the one in ies Olivar Gran, just with our first ESO classmates. Chatting about what the teacher proposes first and then what we propose. The chatting sessions won’t be too long, so that everyone of us can say something.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ASPECTS:

My students are very enthusiastic with their blogs, they have added their classmates’ blogs in their own blogs and they have written comments to each other. Some of them have even included a survey in their own blogs and the others are answering it!!I’m amazed and very happy with their response!!The problem is that the other two schools aren’t doing blogs and haven’t written anything to our blogs. 

You can visit their blogs by clicking on the DISCOVERING WHO WE ARE link.

Besides,the teachers from the project-Laetitia, Daniel and I- can’t enter our etwinning desktop because they are making changes in them. So I feel a bit disconnected from everything.

Neither Daniel nor Laetitia have answered my last mail. I feel that there’s a lack of collaboration and that the project is turning into a different thing from what I have planned to do.

The positive aspect is that my students are collaborating within each other and those who are in introduced in Daniel’s website are collaborating in the different Forums and chatting with other students. They are really improving their English and using it in out-of-school contexts.

We have started our registration in Daniels’ webpage and we have found a lot of problems. First some of the students  don’t have a computer at home so it will be more difficult for them to start with the chat sessions. Second, 8 students didn’t have an e-mail address so we had to do it in class, we created a gmail account for each one of them ( From this experience I’ve learnt that next year I’m going to create a gmail account for all the students who have this problem).

After registering in Daniels’ website and clicking on the mail to verify the registration  we don’t know what happened but just 6 students ( out of 33) could enter the site and participate in the Forum ( they did their presentation ‘ WHo am I?). Now I’ve sent all my students’ list and mails to Daniel and we are waiting for the confirmation and see if my students can start participating in the chat session ( they started last weekend 21st October).

As not all my students could participate in the Forum we haven’t started with the chat sessions-just 3 of them who are more autonomous have done so- and now we are working with our blogs. We havea created our own blogs , we have done three entries. First one with the presentation, then another one with a voki character where they have added their voices doing an oral presentation. Recently we have also explained our daily routine.

As I have explained before there’s a lot of collaboration in this Project, we are not only exchanging grids ( about how to assess our students’ essays for example) but also we are exchanging activities we will do with our students to introduce the topic. Laetitia was the first “to break the ice” and I’ve followed her example. I include here both activities, Laetitia and mine.

LAETITIA’S PRESENTATION ACTIVITY

ROLE PLAY ABOUT THE SIMPSONS

MEETING THE SIMPSONS: THE GRID.

If one thing is clear in this group is that we are collaborating a lot. The forum is full of ideas and we continue discussing everything. Moreover, my NSS counsellor, Diego Rojas, gives a lot of useful ideas which I include in our eTwinning desktop through the forum. The last one he has proposed concerns collaborative work between students, I found it very interesting so I included it as a new topic in the forum. There I wrote:

A TOPIC-BASED APPROACH
I’ve included Diego, my NSS, to our twinspace, he can access it with a new username and password. After reading our comments in the forum he has suggested some interesting things again, I copy them here:
“I’ve read the topics you want to work on. If I may make a suggestion, you could organize the making of materials from a topic-based approach, more than from a country-based one. For example, if your students are to talk about Christmas, in most projects they’ll produce power point presentations explaining several aspects of Christmas holidays in their own countries which will be eventually exchanged. Instead, you could organize students in “international” groups talking about and comparing these aspects in every participant country: one group can make a presentation on “Christmas’ Eve”, another one on “New Year’s Eve”, or “Presents we receive”… This way, they’ll have to communicate, negotiate and collaborate with their foreign partners. One last thing. Part of my work here is to offer you ideas and suggestions. I’ll give you as many as I can think of. That means that -if I do my work well- it will be impossible for you to do them all. I give them to you, so they are YOURS, and you can do whatever you want with them (and doing nothing is an option). ”
I personally find his suggestions very interesting and if we decide to work like that I think that we’ll go a step further in our Project. I suggest that we can work with the Presentation as we have already agreed- this will take more or less a month- so our students will have enough time to get in touch and know themselves better.
Then we can work with the topics: OUR SCHOOL, OUR ROUTINES, OUR ARTS AND CRAFTS, OUR MAIN TRADITIONS…( Here they can suggest things they find important to talk about or choose the topics by themselves) and distribute these topics between the different groups. We can create the groups or let them choose- as you prefer- with one member from each country. I can create the wikispace that our students are going to use and include it in my blog, in this way our students just have to write there and I can also include a page for them to chat where they can ask doubts to each other with no need to send mails( which will make things more difficult).
I also think that it would be good to mix ages in these groups, in this way older ones can help the younger ones or we can also give them the role of “finding mistakes and correct them giving advice” – we can also give them a Students’ Progress Card to see how each one is developing in his/her own role.
I think that everything will be more interesting in this way and more challenging. Students are not producing the same Power Point in each country- talking all of them about the same- but different ones. To make it more participative we can make them explain their Power Point to the others ( We’ll see what Laetitia and I do with our students as they are at a younger age)
What do you think? As Diego suggested he only proposes, and we decide what to do…ARE YOU READY TO TAKE THE CHALLENGE- or ARE OUR STUDENTS READY??

Laetita has had the idea of exchanging a grid where everybody writes the information about how s/he plans to work with hsi/her students. She has included the document in Google Docs so every member of the Project can include information and change it whenever s/he wants.

She’s also sent us a Word Document where she explains us in more detail what she’s going to do. I include it here.

LAETITIA’S DOCUMENT

After lots of mails, I have decided that some review of the main facts was necessary. I enclose here the document I sent to my colleagues. Click on summarizing to see it.

SUMMARIZING

MORE WONDERFUL IDEAS FROM LAETITIA!! See what she has proposed to do in our eTwinning Forum.

Suggesting topics
If we are to work with young students (aged 12) what do you think of making them do a power point showing how Christmas is celebrated in each region. Then if there are big differences they could discuss it in class.
Kids here love Christmas time!

I also thought of making them perform a short play based on stories for children (eg Three little pigs…). They would write the dialogues, make the masks (and costumes?). We could ask them to vote for their favourite one(s),except for their own, and reward the winners. This project could be the final one.

I still have a question though. Are we going to ask them to rate the topics so that they can eventually exclude one of them or add another?

THIS TEAM IS AMAZING!!!

I’m really amazed and thrilling to start working in the Project with all the students!

All the teachers are very participative and bursting with lots of ideas. See Daniel and Laetitia’s answers to my dilemma.

What tools are we going to use?
I’ve seen your proposals and I think that all of them are interesting, but…how are we going to tie everything? Are we going to work through the eTwinning desktop? Are we all going to use blogs? Are we going to use Daniel’s website ?( I think that this could be quite interesting, Daniel has done a great job!, we can add comments or also use it as a chat tool) Or are we going to do a mixture of everything? If so, I think that we must start making some plans.
Lastly, I also think that our students must start doing a brief presentation first ( through blogs, website as you wish..) There’s a wonderful tool in the web ( voki.com) where you can find avatar characters ( students choose their character and then add their own voices. It’s very funny and in this way we don’t have to add photos- which can be sometimes dangerous to use in internet)
Eva
eva hugas , 11-08-08, 13:50

I think that working with one website only (Daniel’s) would make things easier. Can it host a lot of people at the same time, if we decide to make them chat together for instance?But we could also, as you said, first make them visit all the other blogs or websites we’ve created (school websites included) to show them what has already been done in each country. Maybe we could also keep the etwinning desktop just in case there’s a problem with Daniel’s website to do the teachers’ chit-chat work. Thank you for your idea about avatar characters! It’s great! Laetitia Di Rosa , 11-08-2008, 15:37
	Website I agree with Laetitia that it’s easier to do everything on one website. Yes, my website can host lots of students. There are no limits. Students can be grouped according to their countries. Each student can use a private message box, write articles on topics they find interesting, submit photos (I have already prepared photo galleries for each country), share their opinion in the forum, and of course chat. If you want to check this out, we can arrange a time during the week when we can chat on my website. I suggest a time in the evening, say 9 pm. There are also downloads where students can download the presentations we are going to do. We could use my website as the main tool in our project. Moreover, I think that using different tools is a great idea!!! It could give our project a variety, which increases students’ motivation, in my opinion. To sum up, I suggest that we make my website the main tool of our project as it can host every single student participating in it. They can use it whenever they find it suitable – even at home. Any other tools like blogs, school website ect. would be complementary to the project. We would discuss which one to use and when. Lastly, I must admit that I’m really glad to see that we have many options to choose from:)Daniel Redko , 11-08-2008, 19:29

Laetitia has introduced a topic to discuss in the forum of our Project’s space in the eTwinning desktop

Since then two other topics have been introduced and now all the teachers from the Project have really started to exchange opinions and our project is taking shape!!

See here an example:

Starting the project How are we going to connect them together in the first place? Are we going to choose a given date to start making the students share information? Shall we wait ‘til end of September to have time to organize it with them, before they actually start the project? What topic shall we start working on?Laetitia Di Rosa , 28-07-08, 11:53

	Respuestas			Acciones

	Project I’ve just come back from holiday! Yes, I think we have to wait for September, in the meantime we can send some mails in order to decide the different topics we, or better our students ,can write about. See you DanielaDaniela Urbani , 04-08-2008, 16:14
	Topics I think that choosing the topics first is a good idea. Then, when we come back to school we could discuss them with our students. I suggest doing a project about the most famous castles in our countries in the form of a power point presentation. As far as I remember, Eva was thinking about a video introducing the students from each country. I also think that the end of September would be the best time to start off, as it will give us time to organize the details.Daniel Redko , 11-08-2008, 12:46

I love working this way! Everybody gives a lot of ideas and you learn a lot of new things! You also see what other people from other countries are doing in their classes, isn’t it fantastic?

Laetitia has created her first blog , you can visit it at:

LAETITIA’S BLOG . It is a protected blog , to visit it you need a password. But Laetita has included there a video where we can see her students on a trip they did to London.

Daniel has created his own website before starting the Project, and we are going to use it because it is really communicative!! Take a look at DANIEL’S WEBSITE!! There our students will add comments and chat!

By now we have started proposing activities to do.