Brief Description

Uniting stories was a 5-month project for elementary school children based on teaching students values.  The aims of the project were for students to develop their awareness in terms of values education and improve their writing and reading skills in their mother tongue and in English. Each month the partners chose the value of the month by using survey tools. Then they decided on the characters of their stories. After that they  wrote their short stories and published them as ebooks. They chose one story written by their partner and performed it at the end of the school year.

 

1) Pedagogical Innovation

 

Our project’ s topic was what the title suggested: a project that united two schools from different cultures. The project’ s goal was to write and share short stories about values, thus making it possible for the partners to compare their attitudes towards those values The plan with the process and the activities was laid our right from the beginning and it was one commonly decided by the two partner schools. The project was finished according to plan.

The partner teachers tried out a variety of pedagogical methods with their pupils during the project such as:

• posing leading questions for the students to think, research and analyse

• teaching them with examples

• organising collaborative team work and allowing the students the time to discuss and find solutions to problems

• allowing the pupils to choose the value they would write about, the character and the content of their stories

• allowing the students to choose the way to present their stories (by choosing the templates that they used in story jumper themselves)

• allowing the students to use their critical thinking skills and to compare attitudes through the stories they wrote

• allowing them to interact with their peers abroad to reach a common goal (to write a story and stage a play)

 

The students worked mostly in groups. From February to April, they voted which value they would like to write about by answering the survey of each month on google forms. Then they wrote their own short stories about values taking the role first of the researcher, then the author and last the actor. The project gave them the chance to become creative, responsible, autonomous and broad-minded.

 

(2) Curricular Integration

 

The project work was based on the school curriculum since the project aimed at developing students’ competencies as indicated in the schools’ syllabi. Writing short stories in English was fully integrated in the English curriculum, allowing the students to practice mostly writing and reading in the foreign language. Besides that, values education was part of the school curriculum. Right from the start, the aims of the project were clearly laid out in the project plan, which served as the partners’ guide, therefore the teachers knew exactly what activities to carry out with their students to achieve the goals set. Upon joining the project, the partners were aware that these activities were suitable for their students’ age and learning needs. The project work was mostly done during the school hours and the pupils worked mostly in groups.

 

(3) Communication and exchange between partner schools

 

The partner schools in this project communicated mostly through the Twinspace where they shared information, videos, photos, pictures and other materials. Specifically, the students were asked to communicate on the padlet wall “Let’s talk” which was embedded in a Twinspace page. There, they had the chance to give information about themselves, their countries and the cities where they lived. They also wrote and sent letters to each other to get to know each other a little better.

Each month, on a special Twinspace PAGE created for that reason, the students voted the value of the month, and once the result was announced, each partner started writing their stories on the same value and uploading them on the same book on storyjumper. The students were curious to see what their partners had created and wanted to react by leaving some comments on the project journal. During lessons, the teachers showed their students the recent activities on the twinspace and the storyjumper stories produced by the partner school so that the students could observe their partners’ attitude towards the same value. Sharing these stories aimed at comparing cultures, developing the students’ knowledge and widening their horizons. Towards the end of the project, each teacher asked their students to read all the stories produced by their partner and choose one of them in order to stage it. The students presented their play, which was based on their partners’ story, live during an online event in eTwinning live and by means of a video uploaded on the Twinspace.

 

(4) Collaboration between partner schools

 

First, the project partners decided together on a common list of values and then they voted the value of the month on the common values questionnaire of the month.

The collaborative final product of this project was a collection of short stories about the same value, published in the same ebook on storyjumper which is a collaborative tool. We read the ebooks in class during our lessons and shared our ideas.

There were also two plays staged in the partner schools, which the partners watched during an online event.

The partners helped each other in organizing the Twinspace so that there were PAGES for each month with all the activities carried out by the partners during that month.  

 

(5) Use of technology

 

The partner schools used their classroom interactive board and/or computer lab to interact with each other. Firstly, the collaboration and arrangements among the teachers started on the TwinSpace and all the materials were later uploaded there. The tools used to exchange information were mainly photos and videos of the partner schools uploaded on the Twinspace.

The Twinspace tools used for communicating, exchanging information, discussing issues, asking and answering questions and giving solutions to problems were the Project Journal and the Teacher Bulletin. Communication among the teachers was also made possible through the use of Twinmail, email and whatsapp. An eTwinning video conference was also scheduled and it was used for the online staging of our plays. Storyjumper hosted the collection of our short stories.

Among other tools used, we can mention biteable for making our two project trailers, image editing tools like pizap for collages, software like Movie Maker, Powerpoint and Word, youtube for uploading and sharing video tutorials and our videos with our plays, google forms for voting the value of the month and the final evaluation questionnaire for the pupils, google docs for writing in collaboration the project plan and the application for the QL. All the students were added as Twinspace members and communication among them was made possible mostly through the use of a padlet wall embedded in a twinspace page for that reason. eSafety rules were kept. There were no picture or music copyright issues, listing pupils’ names or publishing their personal data. Before posting pupils’  videos & photos parental consent was taken.

 

(6) Results, impact and documentation

 

Visible project results:   

• project products presented in the Twinspace Pages 

• exchange of work and feedback on project journal - https://twinspace.etwinning.net/60051/home

• evaluation questionnaire done by the pupils after completing the project as well as the teachers’ evaluation of the project - https://twinspace.etwinning.net/60051/pages/page/400647

• detailed plan of the project - https://twinspace.etwinning.net/60051/pages/page/350845

 

Invisible project results:

 

• all students who joined the project had the chance to learn about values in a different way by writing their own values stories

• the students definitely improved their reading and writing skills, their story-writing skills, their creativity and imagination as well as the ability of public performance and social skills, they succeeded in making their school and their hometown known abroad and they felt members of a bigger community

• the students were motivated to learn English through a fun, collaborative way, interacting both with their friends in class as well as with their peers in the partner school

• the students learned how to use some web tools, mostly padlet and storyjumper and got more familiar with the Twinspace

• the teachers, among other things, improved their collaboration and organizational skills, they met new colleagues and shared teaching practices with them, they were able to improve their ICT skills, they built a stronger relationship with their students through providing them with collaborative activities in a relaxed learning environment

• the students as well as their teachers developed their awareness about different cultures and they had a chance to see similarities, too

• the project changed the attitudes of the whole school community towards our partner school helping demolish the prejudices

• the local community of each partner school had the chance to learn about the school’ s activities and trust between the parents and the teachers was further built

 

 

Our collaborative doc for the QL:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AEedfaiwibEkmrS_2FCMPW8PC3EJnY6-nlEaPi1U3bw/edit?usp=sharing