1st Transnational Meeting 21-23 November 2017 - Greece - ATHENS

  •           The 1st Transnational Meeting in Athens has been organized by the Greek team in order to share  aims and distribute responsibilities, take decisions, fix timetables and cooperate to contribute positively and efficaciously to the implementation of  the new project.                

    The agenda was fully respected and this first phase has been very helpful in order to establish how to synchronize activities, appointments and principal tasks.

    After having discussed about the involvement of the whole school educational communities, we decided to stimulate the students to work all together in designing and selecting the logo and voting  for it through electronic means. This will motivate them in taking an active role in the whole process.

    Then we  talked about how to motivate children to acquire skills, abilities and transversal competences through digital games  using ICT and the internet to play with coding.

    Moreover, the different teams discussed about allowing teachers and pupils to explore different sites and resources to play and create digital games to review, reinforce or assess disciplinary contents or concepts.

    Traditional indoor and/or outdoor games will be exploited as well to fulfil different educational scenarios and goals.

    Last but not least, teachers took the decision to write brief articles, comments and evaluation about the results; they  will also guide pupils to express their opinions and reflections about their progress and acquisitions of abilities and competences through game based learning.

     Texts, photos and videos will be uploaded in the etwinning platform, in a blog and in the website to facilitate reflections, discussions and  dissemination among a wider community of teachers, parents, students and stakeholders.

    In the end the Italian team wants to express the most sincere gratitude for the warm hospitality to the Principal, Mr Konstatinos Arvanitakis and all the Greek teachers from the 11th Primary School of Chalandri, in Athens and special thanks to Mrs Maria Skiadelli for her leading contribute.

    Foggia, Italy, 25/11/2017

    The Italian team

    Mrs Pasqua Aida Pappalepore

    Mr Luigi Iazzetti

     

     

    Mrs Maria Skiadelli's ROADMAP

     

    A roadmap from our 1st to our 2nd meeting

     

    Teacher and student activities for our project “Our School, our Playground” that have been agreed between partners during our first meeting. All partners schools should participate in at least one of these four bundles of activities. By the end of 2017 each partner should have declared to which of these activities the teachers of his/her school would like to participate. During our 2nd meetings some finished or on-going activities will be presented.

     

    1 Supporting the “Hour of Code”

     

    Ask the ICT teacher/s of your school if they would like to participate in this activity. Tell them to send an email to skiadelli@cti.gr to express their interest. I will create a special forum on twinspace platform and ask them to participate in this forum in order to find activities that would support the hour of code event (either this year, or next year.) This may include game making activities based on Scratch or other suitable software. This group will be our first on-line teacher community and it will be moderated by me on a pilot basis. We will see how it will work out and what problems we will have to face.

     

    2. Traditional games

     

    Get teachers of all subjects involved in this bundle of activities. The teachers that would participate in these activities have to think of traditional games of their country/area that would like to play with their students indoors or outdoors. If the games can support educational goals it would be a plus but it is not obligatory, in this case. Each teacher with his/her students has to :

    1. Find the game and write down the rules of the game or a little bit if its history
    2. Write down an educational scenario on how this game can be played at school
    3. Play the game one or more times with the students
    4. Create a small video or get some photos while playing the game
    5. Provide photos or images of materials needed (if any) in order to play the game
    6. Write one or more small articles on our blog with the help of the students on the experience they had while playing the game

     

    3. Board Games

     

    Teachers of all subjects can be involved in this activity. Teachers should invent with their students a board game that they will play in classroom. The game can be inspired by some known board game (memo, snakes and ladders, bingo, etc.) or can be a completely new idea. It should serve educational goals i.e. it should be combined with the curriculum area or subject. This is compulsory for board games in order to have an educational added value. Each teacher with his/her students has to:

    1. Design the game and write down the rules of the game
    2. Create with the students all the material needed in order to play the game (cards, board, pawns, etc.) Use material from the internet if necessary.
    3. Write down an educational scenario on how this game can be played in classroom. Pay attention to educational goals.
    4. Play the game one or more times with the students
    5. Create a small video or get some photos while playing the game
    6. Provide photos or images of materials needed (board, cards) to play the game
    7. Write one or more small articles on our blog with the help of the students on the experience they had while playing the game

     

    4. Digital / on – line games

     

    Teachers of all subjects can be involved but they should be familiar with the use of ICT and have access to some technology infrastructure (computers, tablets, etc.) With the help of their students they try to find on-line games or apps that can be used in certain curriculum areas for instance physical science, maths, history, etc. They spend our to find the games in the school lab or at home. They write what they have found to a special forum on Twinspace. The teacher/s that participate in this activity should create accounts on Twinspace beforehand. Students contribute to this forum by providing links to the on-line games that they have found, as well as a small description of the game. If they are not very comfortable in English they can write in their own language. The important thing is discussion and participation in the forum.

    With the help of their teacher, each group if students in every participating country choses which games finally will play in classroom or in the computer lab. On-line games can either be played by small groups of students on their computers or tablets or by a whole class using the interactive whiteboard.

    Teachers write an educational scenario about how the game can be played in classroom and what do kids can learn while playing.

    Students write small articles on the blog about their experience. 

     

    Minutes 1st meeting in Greece   21st to 23rd of November 2017

    Tuesday, 21st of November 2017

    The participating teachers of the seven countries arrived at the hosting school 11th primary school of Chalandri at around 10:00 am. A performance event that had been organized by teachers and students of the school was presented to them based on traditional and modern Greek music and songs.

    After that the teachers mad a tour around some classes of the school where they were welcomed by students and they had been offered small presents hand crafted by them.

    The main meeting agenda started in the computer lab of the school where most of the activities of the meeting took place. The 6th graders had created a quiz on Europe’s history between the 15th and the 19th century using the on-line tool called Kahoot. They played the quiz in groups by their computers. The visitors participated via their mobile phones. At the end, the winner was proclaimed.

    Later all partners had the chance to clear things up about the project proposal. The coordinator teacher, Mrs Maria Skiadelli gave some examples of game templates and lesson plans based on games.  Relative links are given below. Partners decided on which areas to focus during the first months of the project and how to start working on these areas. More specifically they chose to work on learn how to code games (only for ICT teachers group), traditional games, board games and digital or on-line games. Based on this decision the coordinator created a brief roadmap document meant to be used by the teachers want to participate in the project.

    Wednesday, 22nd of November 2017

    The meeting started with a session “get to know each other” according to the agenda. Later each partner presented his/her own part of work in the project.

    ETwinning

    The Italian partner made a small introduction to the eTwinning platform and how to use the Twinspace in our project. Pros and cons of using eTwinning were discussed between partners and we decided to use eTwinning mainly for communication purposes (i.e. forums, live chats, bulletin boards and pages) as well as the material section for selective photos, videos and files. However, our main project archive will be kept on Google drive due to more flexible file management and file searching capabilities. All teachers participating in the project will be strongly urged to acquire an eTwinning account and be invited to participate in the project. In some cases, student accounts will be created for our students as well, so that the students can also participate mainly in discussion forums. We will re-examine, reevaluate and perhaps reconsider the use of eTwinning in our project in a short-term time, as we all agreed that it is a useful tool and we would like to profit from it, yet we are not all pretty much aware of its affordances.

    Google Drive

    The full file, photo and video repository will be kept on Google drive. This is the reason why the uscop8 google account was created. All partners got access to the account and are able to wither get access to the files stored there or create new folders and upload new files. Cyprus will be responsible to get files sent by either means like email for instance or on messenger and store them on google file, so that no information is lost from our archive. Poland will be responsible to do the same thing for videos and photos. The photos app can be used for this purpose to create new albums of photos.

    Blog

    Bulgarian partner presented to the group the new blog of the project created with blogger. The blog will be used so that teachers and students of the project have a simple mean to express their opinion, write about their experience through game playing and document project activities in their own way. The blog offers a simple mechanism for posting new articles and comment on other’s articles. The blog will be moderated by the Bulgarian partner. Teachers and students can write on the blog using their mother tongue as well, not only English. The knowledge of English should not be an obstacle in general for students and teachers to participate in the project. Automatic translate methods can be used to translate the posts created on the blog for instance, by other partners. Only educational scenarios (lesson plans) should be translated by the contact person of each country to English in order to be included in our deliverables.  All other material produced can be produced in the original partner language.

    Logo creation

    Spain presented a procedure about how the logo of the project will be created. We decided all countries to decide about one and only logo till the end of the year (2017). Each country can use its own procedure. In January an electronic vote between schools of all countries will be held that will bring up the logo of the project. Everyone can vote (teachers, students, parents) but not for his/her country’s logo.  After the logo has been chosen it will be placed on blog, web site and any other dissemination material produced by partners.

    Web site

    The Turkish partner made a small presentation about the structure of the web site, considering other Erasmus+ projects’ websites, as well as our previous project web site. The structure that all the partners agreed on is the following:

    HOMEPAGE

     LOGO (WHEN IS READY)

    A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF THE PROJECT (MAIN OBJECTIVES, PROVIDED BY MARIA)

    WHO WE ARE

    INTRODUCING PARTNER SCHOOLS AND COUNTRIES (PROVIDED  BY EACH PARTNER, ONE PAGE PER PARTNER)

    DISEMINATION

    - EVENTS  (THAT TAKE PLACE IN PARTNER SCHOOLS, photos small decription)

    - DISSEMINATION MATERIAL (BROSHURES, POSTERS, NEWSPAPER ARTICLES, ETC.)

    MEETINGS (MEETING PLACE,  DATES AND TITLE , A FEW PHOTOS)

    EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES (SOME OF THE EDUCATIONAL SCENARIOS (LESSON PLANS) CREATED BY THE TEACHERS. To be filled after we have some scenarios ready to be presented in public)

    GAMES (names and descriptions of games used in our project, accompanied by images or photos)

    TOOLS  (digital tools and games used in our project for various purposes)

    BLOG (a link to our blog)

    Αποτέλεσμα εικόνας για mailCONTACT

    our-school-our-playground@googlegroups.com

    Αποτέλεσμα εικόνας για facebook 

        https://www.facebook.com/groups/uScop/

     

    For the implementation of the web site the WIX platform will be used.

    Evaluation

    The Romanian partner presented the evaluation criteria and methodology of our project. A teacher evaluation will take place by the end of 2017 beginning 2018 and a general student and teacher evaluation will take place by the end of the first year.

     

    Links used during our meeting

     

    Lesson plans based on games : https://teachers.net/lessonplans/subjects/games/http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/learninggame.shtml

    Teaching with games: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/strategy/strategy065.shtml

    Kids games and activities: https://www.activityvillage.co.uk/games

    Sustainable development board game: http://go-goals.org/

    Tombola (bingo) game: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pmfm28JyvXcFfmKFXp-7BBi3oEXIWfRd

    Board game templates: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PI1T4GiDzb8-fGf8fnNkz3ueAidxyenU

    Digital games:  https://reviewgamezone.com/

     

    ALL DOCUMENTS  ARE AVAILABLE AT THIS LINK: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vskmVMDVQrUg3g34sXU5dRTjy4oOs3tx