School is Cool - Let‘s Play and Learn!
Description:
The main objective of this project is to assess potential students and discover their talents. Helping children discover what they are good at encourages healthy self-esteem and it is also key to their success later in life. Play is the most natural way to achieve this.
This project is a disseminaton/summary of the activities of the K1Erasmus project of our teachers, but also a continuation of cooperation with our e-twinning friends who we invited to join us in this endeavour.
Students will improve language, digital,
social, mathematical, social and other competences.
After an introductory phase, e-twinning partners will exchange ideas, experiences, games ... After that we will create teams. The teams will play games, complete tasks, share knowledge, and meet peers across Europe . Continuous evaluation is a very important part of the project. Therefore, during the collaboration we will create activities in which students will self-evaluate their work and also evaluate each other. We will also present the results of the project to other teachers in our schools.
Pedagogical Objectives
• Getting to know other people, learning about other cultures while at the same time getting to knowourselves better.
• Developing a sense of collaboration and group work, learning to be part of a team. The products are results of all members’ work so everyone’s contribution is essential for the final success. That makes all pupils indispensable and ‘important’.
• Cultivating skills in various areas including intellectual, communication and analysis. During the tasksthe pupils need to follow their mentor’s instructions, follow up on their partners’ contributions, reflect their own contribution, discover possible solutions, suggest ideas, negotiate the final product, choose and vote for what they prefer, consider and decide names, ideas, stories etc.
• Learning the value of evaluation through evaluation of the final outcomes. Each school is responsiblefor evaluating the final products of all teams as well as evaluating their members’ active performance and contribution to the creation of these results. This enhances the pupils’ critical thinking and leads to a just evaluation of others’ work as well as their own.
• Improving ICT and Internet communication skills. All the tasks are done with Web tools that allowpupils to work online collaboratively and produce a joint product. As mentors and partners are in other schools, communication is all done through TwinSpace. This process helps pupils realise how education can be achieved via long distance learning methods and how today’s classrooms differs from those of the past.
Before the project
• Teachers discuss and decide the timetable for the project. They decide on the Challenges and who is responsible for setting which Challenge tasks.(Challenges are problems or tasks that the through the games teacher creates which need pupils to work together collaboratively to solve or complete. They can cover any subject or combination of subjects; , ICT, Science, History, Maths, Language, Music, Sports and P.E., Arts & Crafts, Maths Religion and are described in more detail in the Process section)
• They form the groups (splitting their pupils) and become mentors of the groups.
• They invite their pupils to the TwinSpace giving them usernames and passwords so that they can log in independently.
• They write the group s members and their mentors in the Pupils Corner and each mentor starts a new category for their team. All communication between the mentors and the team members takes place there.
During the project
• The project begins with an introductory phase where pupils introduce themselves and their school and city. They can take photos of their school or make a short video of the school and parts of their city. They introduce themselves with a voki avatar and complete their profile. Students are always encouraged to write comments under the posts, giving their opinions and impressions.
• The teachers will create the tasks for students. They will put photos,links and materials on the e-twinning platform.
• Each mentor makes a post in the Forum for the team members and asks them to start the tasks by giving them specific instructions, replying to questions, making suggestions, assigning responsibilities, organising polls, etc.
• When the products of each team are ready, the mentor publishes them on Twinspace in the relevant page.
• When a Challenge is finished, a school starts the evaluation of all the products and all of the teams. There is a separate page for evaluation and each school publishes the results and the scores there.
• Each Mentor announces the most active member of the team as the Leader and a collage of the Challenge Leaders is made either by using photographs,videos, drawings, etc.
Ending the project
• Pupils make a presentation of his progres during the project with pictures and texts about their likes and talents they have discovered during the project.
• Pupils make an evaluation of the whole project and mention their favourite Challenge and favourite tasks.
Examples of tasks
ICT Challenge
• Choose your team’s name
• Make a group collage
• Design your group’s Coat of Arms and choose your group’s motto
• Create a word cloud with your group’s strengths and weaknesses.
Science Challenge
• Create a team blog about your star and constellation
• Mark all the teams’ stars and make a new constellation, choose a name and its picture
• Take a quiz based on all the blogs
Religion Challenge
• Choose a biblical person and make his Religious /Facebook profile
• Take a quiz based on all the Fakebooks
Arts & Crafts Challenge
• Create an imaginary planet for your star
• Create an alien-inhabitant of this planet
• Organise online drawing and each team draws a landscape of its planet
Maths Challenge
• Make a geometric model of your star
• Take a quiz ‘Maths & Stars’
• Solve Maths problems
Music Challenge
• Form your planet’s band – draw the instruments & give the band a name
• Answer a quiz on the European Anthem
• Compose an anthem for your planet and write some lyrics for it.
Noteflight Language Challenge
• Write a legend for our new constellation
• Make a wish as you see a shooting star
• Write about life on your new planets
Sports Challenge
• Make your team’s common mural with your favourite sports
• Do a Physical Fitness test and upload the results
• Create a common video presenting your team dancing to a chosen song
Evaluation & Assessment
• Evaluation takes place at the end of each Challenge by the pupils themselves who evaluate the final products and the teams’ performance. The results are recorded on a board on the ‘Leader Board and Hall of Fame’ page. This way all pupils are encouraged to work hard or even harder for better results as competition is created among the groups.
• Teachers evaluate their team members’ performance and choose one, the most active, as the Challenge Leader. This is another way to promote competitionand active participation among the members who try to become Leaders of their team.
• Evaluation tasks must also be devised at the end of the project when pupils are asked to evaluate the whole project and choose their favourite tasks and Challenges.
Follow-up
• Information on the project and its progress can be included on the school’s website so that the school’s and the city’s wider community can be informed.
• An eTwinning Corner can be created with pictures and printed material of the final products so that the whole school can learn more about the project.
• The tasks may provide ideas for other teachers to incorporate in their subjects as they cover a wide range of topics.
• Parents can be informed though a parents evening or by devising a challenge that involves them also.
eTwinning is part of Erasmus+, the EU programme for Education,
Training, Youth and Sport