Greece: Maria Pasparaki
It has been a successful and pleasant collaboration during this demanding project, especially with the Italian partner and her students.
The initial plan was carried out according to our schedule. After the short presentation of each student seperately, as their accounts in TwinSpace were created, a group presentation with a photo of the classes that participated in the project followed.
A very successful skype meeting between Greek and Italian students helped them break the ice and introduce themselves in real time to their partners. Friendship was promoted, that continue even after the end of the collaboration. Details of the collaboration were discussed during the skype meeting and students agreed to follow a particular schedule during their research in the Internet.
Students were divided into five groups and each group chose a continent to work on. The groups started to follow the calendar. So, the first part of their research was on Christmas customs all over the world. The four involved countries completed a detailed research on traditional customs of this period and uploaded their work on the files area.
Carnival and Easter followed the period of Christmas and, this time, students collaborated in creating common web pages in Twinspace, and uploading everything by themselves. They worked together both at the level of content and at the level of page formatting.
At the end of the project, students had to evaluate it.
The competences of reading comprehension, writing skills and oral skills in foreign language were practised. Their ICT skills improved, as well as their ability to evaluate information and use it to make short presentations. Getting to know different cultures and civilisations helped our students to broaden their minds and to develop multicultural consciousness.
The positive aspects of the project were learning to search and to evaluate gathered information, team work, collaboration, developing civic competence, practising English language, using web 2.0 tools.
Some drawbacks of the project were the lack of time to work on the project and the fact that our schools were unable to end the cooperation by a real visit to our colleagues, something that our students had asked for persistently!
Italy: Lorena Cavicchi
The project has been carried out according to initial plan and schedule.
The class has been divided into five groups made up of two -three students . To each group a continent has been assigned . Their task was to search on the web “ the most beautiful traditions” of countries belonging to that continent. We started with Christmas customs and celebrations, to follow with Carnival and finally Easter.
For the work on Easter, mixed groups have been formed. The Italian students collaborated with the Greek partners and searched about different countries of the same continent and produced a single work , made up of text and pictures , uploaded on the twinspace .
At the beginning of the project there was a Skype meeting between Italians and Greek . This was very useful ; students could see their partners , have a little conversation in English with them, joke with them. In this way they got more involved in the project. Successively they also kept in contact through whatsapp , to communicate about the project but also to just talk a little about themselves.
The abilities practised were mainly : the reading -comprehension skill in a foreign language , (for the web search) , the writing skill (to produce their own work and communicate with partners) and the IT skills, (use of the platform Twinspace, upload of documents and pictures. (also a video)
There was also a good collaboration between teachers especially with the Greek partner, who I personally met via skype a few times to discuss about the development of the project.
The final evaluation is positive; it has been a good opportunity to use a foreign language- English for real communication and also a good way to learn how to work in a team , each student contributing to the creation of a common work.