Alyona KELLECİ, KEPEZ İLKOKULU, ANTALYA

 BENİM OKULUM

HERE IS MY PROJECT PLAN

Title        

My European penfriends

Short description

The basic idea of this project is to create a real connection and friendship between the partner students.

The project consists of several modules of which the students and the teachers can choose the most appropriate/interesting ones for the actual project. The modules will have different topics e.g likes and dislikes, seasons, holidays, free time activities, hobbies, family members, home countries, etc.

In a safe virtual learning environment such as Twinspace, the students can get to know each other, share information and experiences and learn communication (including foreign language) and ICT skills at the same time. Or if the students don't have İnternet connection we can exchange traditional letters.

The age range of the pupils of a potential partner for a Project is from 6 to 9.

The number of students to participate depends on the number of partner schools

Pedagogical Objectives of the project are:

• Encourage students to get to know each other and become friends

• Develop students’ abilities to communicate in foreign language, share information and collaborate virtually

• Enhance students’ ICT skills

• Enhance students’ understanding and knowledge of European countries and cultures

Work process

Students will start exchanging some short texts about themselves to introduce each other. Then they can exchange  postcards. Furthermore, they can chat via Skype or similar.

Students can make some collaborative activities, like preparing an e-book about their penpals country, or a poster for every topic.

A short Questionnaire (e.g. Google Forms or Survey Monkey) can be used for comparing information between different countries and discussing similarities and differences. Questions can deal with favourite school subjects, free time activities, hobbies, families, home towns, pets, favourite food, etc.

Expected results

Kahoot! and Socrative quizzes can be used at the end of each module as formative assessment to check what students remember about the topics and how their thematic foreign language knowledge has developed.

Assessment of the project:

At the end of the project students fill in a questionnaire addressing their feelings and experiences about the project, what was good and what could be improved.

Students also assess how their attitudes have changed, what they have learned during the project and how their skills have developed in:

• foreign language skills

• ICT skills

• communication and collaboration skills

• cultural understanding

Students make some collaborative activities, like preparing an e-book about their penpals country,preparing a presentation about their penpals country with the help of web.2 tools  or a poster for every topic.

Golden rules for successful eTwinning collaboration

In any good task or project, there must be rules to follow and fulfill to guarantee its success. Next, we list nine golden rules that will ensure the success of your eTwinning collaborative project.

1. Get to know your partners: share with your partners all the necessary information, such as the number of students participating in the project, your students’ age and interests, your students’ level in foreign languages and their ICT skills.
2. Create a detailed time schedule: set the starting dates for each task, mark the dates when one of the partner schools is on holidays, share it with your students, set deadlines and respect them.
3. Preparatory planning leads to a successful eTwinning project: plan a meeting, introduce the project to the children and inform the parents, the colleagues and the headteacher about the specific project; add more teachers from your school to the project and form school teams; announce the beginning of the project on the school website; create Twinspace accounts for all the participants, and invite students to the Twinspace; organise mini-courses for your students on ICT tools to be used, and on how to use the Twinspace; create Twinspace tutorials for students or partners who are beginners in eTwinning (if necessary).
4. Design your Twinspace carefully: create activity pages for each one of the planned tasks, add a short description for each one of the activities planned at the top of each activity page, agree with your partners about the most suitable tools for each one of the activities, and add them to your activity pages.
5. Break the ice and get to know each other: have students interact as much as possible, ask them to update their Twinspace profiles by adding a short description of themselves, and a representative avatar. Ask them to leave comments on their partners’ walls, and to vote for the best Twinspace profiles. Plan chat sessions and skype meetings regularly. Find creative ways to have your students introduce themselves and their school or country.
6. Team your students up in Transnational Groups: team students up in transnational groups, create a table with the newly formed transnational groups and add it to the Twinspace. Ask your students to work together and write a short description of their group members. Ask your students to also agree upon a name for their group and draw together a symbol or an emblem for each group.
7. Plan as many collaborative activities as possible: try to plan activities that need your partners’ contribution to be completed. Use as many collaborative tools as possible (Google suite, DrawitLive, Glogster, etc.). Try to avoid creating folders for each country in Twinspace (successful collaborative activities are the ones in which you cannot tell which of the partners did what!).
8. Assign responsibilities to your students: discover your students’ talents and skills and give them responsibilities. Team the students up in groups, according to their talents (the painting group, the photography group, the ICT group, etc.), and assign to some students the role of "student administrator" in Twinspace.
9. Set Evaluation Criteria: try to evaluate the quality of your project along with your partners. Recognize Key Strengths, and identify areas that need improvement. Plan ongoing evaluation activities (share opinions, make proposals, comment on each other’s work).

https://www.mentimeter.com/s/029441c017f63aed16c2e8e2026f34af/de626f28b84f

my students started learning English this year, so as a collaborative activity I used Menti for them to write their names. they were very excited, because we used ICT

Here are some ideas about the quality of the projects. I myself find them very useful.

                                   we have written our project drafts according to this short scheme

In this module we have a chance to make a project draft and have some critics about it. here is the project draft of mine. I am waiting for constructive comments to develop it...

        

Let’s be penfriends

Short description

The basic idea of this project is to create a real connection and friendship between the partner students.

The project consists of several modules of which the students and the teachers can choose the most appropriate/interesting ones for the actual project. The modules will have different topics e.g likes and dislikes, seasons, holidays, free time activities, hobbies, family members, home countries, etc.

In a safe virtual learning environment such as Twinspace, the students can get to know each other, share information and experiences and learn communication (including foreign language) and ICT skills at the same time. Or if the students don't have İnternet connection we can exchange traditional letters.

It’s important that the students learn to discuss different matters freely and connect them to their own lives. We can create a separate page for each topic.

The age range of the pupils of a potential partner for a Project is from 6 to 9.

The number of students to participate depends on the number of partner schools

Pedagogical Objectives of the project are:

• Encourage students to get to know each other and become friends

• Develop students’ abilities to communicate in foreign language, share information and collaborate virtually

• Enhance students’ ICT skills

• Enhance students’ understanding and knowledge of European countries and cultures

Work process

Students will start exchanging some short texts about themselves to introduce each other. Then they can exchange  postcards. Furthermore, they can chat via Skype or similar.

Students can be divided into small groups, so that they can get to know each other better by chatting. Students prepare a few questions for the chat.

A short Questionnaire (e.g. Google Forms or Survey Monkey) can be used for comparing information between different countries and discussing similarities and differences. Questions can deal with favourite school subjects, free time activities, hobbies, families, home towns, pets, favourite food, etc.

Expected results

Kahoot! and Socrative quizzes can be used at the end of each module as formative assessment to check what students remember about the topics and how their thematic foreign language knowledge has developed.

Assessment of the project:

At the end of the project students fill in a questionnaire addressing their feelings and experiences about the project, what was good and what could be improved.

Students also assess how their attitudes have changed, what they have learned during the project and how their skills have developed in:

• foreign language skills

• ICT skills

• communication and collaboration skills

• cultural understanding

Today we've learnt  how to become a successful eTwinner. Ignacio Casado launches a question: What would you do to improve in your classroom? How could Project-Based Learning improve it?

I like using various apps and programmes in my classroom. Menti, storyjumper, padlet, emaze, animoto, powtoon, kahoot… there are so many tools, I like all of them. And I would like to work on new methodologies on combining all these features and integrate them into the teaching process. I would like my students to learn by experience and not learn by heart, that is why it's always important for them to analyse the problems and find solutions. And it becomes easier when you have PBL.

Today we were asked to analyze our teaching  practices, so I found the following:

1)      What can I improve? There can be more creativity on my lessons if I use more ICT tools. Teaching will be more effecive with PBL.

2)      What I am not happy  with? Two hours of English per week is not enough for beginners to learn English. And fifteen groups of students sometimes make me exhausted, but there is no other English teacher in my school. The classes are overcrowded so it’s difficult to motivate the students and draw their attention to foreign language learning.

3)      Is there anything not working? Using ICT tools requires ICT  devices and, unfortunately,  we only have the smarboard in our classes. There are still many things that need  improvement in my country.

4)      How could Project Based Learning improve it? What would I like to try? I have joined eTwinning several months ago, and my teaching practice have changed a lot. Now I  try to learn and use more web.2 tools on my lessons and it helps me to motivate my students; my students and I now have penpals to exchange letters with, we code games and colourings and that’s really fun. Though it takes more time to prepare the lesson using ICT tools, I like it. And I really would like to participate in an effective Etwinning Project.