Forum+School+links+experiences

by [|Myroslava Loboiko] - Tuesday, 8 November 2011, 12:03 AM ||
 * My experience
 * My experience
 * =  || I have already written in the “Starter questions” forum that we do have some experience of project work. We do projects, support them, and encourage their duration. I’d like to share my experience on doing the project with the Novohrad-Volynskyi Collegium which is called “People to People”. It started in 2002 with pen-pal emails in English. The aim of it was to promote communication of students from different parts of Ukraine and improve their communicative skills in English through emailing. It may sound ridiculous to use English for communication instead of the mother tongue. But both sides got interested in the project greatly. We were happy to observe that the project was steadily becoming bigger and bigger involving more and more students and covering more and more spheres of their life. Twice a year we do exchange visits and try on the life of each other.

When we come to our friends, our students spend some days in the partner school visiting the lessons, participating in subject olympiads within the "Science Day" and are involved in other activities. The reason is that we tried and managed to establish good social relationships and now we can boast of many students who have made friends and still keep in touch even after leaving both schools. So, benefits are obvious. It is a nice opportunity for students to be able to share their own experience with the like. But we faced some problems too. We were interested in developing our students’ English skills and it appeared rather difficult to make them use English rather than Ukrainian. It worked with emails but it was challenging to have them speak as there was not enough motivation. So we did our best to create the conditions where students are motivated to speak English. We planned and held different events like giving concerts, showing plays, competing in various language contests and Olympiads, etc. One more obligatory task of the project is to write feedback or personal reflections of visits in English which are published in our FL department newspaper.

I am proud that the project has become a long-term one and we are planning our 17th meeting right now. Time flies, generations change, but our project still works and helps people meet, understand each other, share, compare and contrast. Through the years of participating in the project the students have come to the conclusion that “we are different and we are the same”. And it is great!!! ||

by [|Liudmila Ariutova] - Saturday, 5 November 2011, 10:28 PM || [|Reply] || by [|Tetyana Yarmysh] - Saturday, 5 November 2011, 11:41 PM || We continued searching for partners on the Global Gateway by providing information about our school and listing the names of the countries we would prefer to set up some project with. Lucky we were! We received e-mail from India and decided on to the story writing project. "Ten minutes to save the world" was the theme of the story to be collaboratively written. My students wrote first two paragraphs and then sent it to be completed by the students from India. The next stage was to illustrate this fantasy (as it turned out to be) and exchange the finished versions. It was amasing how creative our students can be. To my shame we have given up using Global Gateway. To sum up, not all our attempts to find partners for a project were successful. You need to be persistent and patient, unfortunately, the lack of time and paper routine often prevents us from keeping on doing this work and trying again and again. [|Show parent] | [|Reply] || by [|Raisa Istomina] - Sunday, 6 November 2011, 07:28 PM ||
 * What projects were the most beneficial in your practice?
 * =  || The teaching of English is impossible without project activities. It's a kind of creation of authentic language environment
 * = [[image:http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/pix.php/2041/f2.jpg width="35" height="35" caption="Picture of Tetyana Yarmysh" link="http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/view.php?id=2041&course=9"]] || Re: What projects were the most beneficial in your practice?
 * =  || Our story of participating in international school links projects began in 2003 with Mondialogo School Contest when we were paired with a school in the Phillippines. For 5 months the students communicated by emailing sharing stories about the countries' history and traditions, photos of school events. There was even the topic "Five items that can be found only in this country". The physical product of this collaboration was the book "East meets West" which was published in Manila and sent to us by the post. Of about 100 world wide participating schools 25 were nominated as participants of the international conference in Barselona to meet with partner schools face-to- face and present their physical products. We were among those 25.
 * = [[image:http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/pix.php/2040/f2.jpg width="35" height="35" caption="Picture of Raisa Istomina" link="http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/view.php?id=2040&course=9"]] || Re: What projects were the most beneficial in your practice?
 * =  || Tanya, what were the changes in organising school links projects after participating in the international conference in Barcelona? If any? Was it a positive experience?

I do projects regularly, but without using Learning Technologies. Now I plan to start a school links project. i'd be glad to get any piece of advice from you how to do it. Thanks. [|Show parent] | [|Reply] || by [|Tetyana Yarmysh] - Monday, 7 November 2011, 11:04 AM || [|Show parent] | [|Reply] || by [|Natalia Kolotova] - Monday, 7 November 2011, 02:32 AM ||
 * = [[image:http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/pix.php/2041/f2.jpg width="35" height="35" caption="Picture of Tetyana Yarmysh" link="http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/view.php?id=2041&course=9"]] || Re: What projects were the most beneficial in your practice?
 * =  || Answering your question, Raisa, our next partner on Mondialogo School Contest was Iordania and we failed to complete ithe project at the very final stage of it. It was such a disapointment for our students. Our partners just stopped communicating. Three years ago UNESCO stopped financing MSP. So we started to use Global Gateway portal.
 * = [[image:http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/pix.php/2036/f2.jpg width="35" height="35" caption="Picture of Natalia Kolotova" link="http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/user/view.php?id=2036&course=9"]] || Re: What projects were the most beneficial in your practice?
 * =  || I hope our university will start a project soon as nobody has ever attempted to do something like this. [[image:http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/theme/britcounv3_nav/pix/s/thoughtful.gif caption="thoughtful"]] So much fuss is made about privacy, information/identity protection these days [[image:http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/theme/britcounv3_nav/pix/s/sad.gif width="15" height="15" caption="sad"]] ||