How the email writing is organized

Once, you have created twins from the students, they take this situation very seriously. When they write letters on given topics, they expect answers from their new friends. Sending emails is not fun. I usually teach the topic of the letter during my lessons and then my students have some time to prepare the letter. When they are ready, we go to the computer room and we write the letters. Before they send them to their friends and me, I usually check them and help them with mistakes. What I really like is the friendly atmosphere in the classroom. They do not hasitate to ask me about grammar problems individually and they learn a lot. We have built up the rules of email writing. The students are not allowed to surf the net during the lesson, they have to do what they have been told, after checking their email and successfully sending, I give them a couple of minutes to use the Internet for their personal mail. What is very interesting that classes which use forum in the eTwinning twinspace are so interested that they do not try to break the rules and they create new topics, read the messages from their Greek friends and answer them ,as well.

The advantage for the teacher is that all the topics are saved in the twinspace and we can read them at home and think about the mistakes the children have made. I think that the forum in twinspace could be used for a wide range of activities with all our students. We can together think of some more.

Welcome to my blog, all my dear members

I am very glad to see all my members here. I would like to tell you that I will be very happy if you feel free to express your ideas, suggestions, anything you would like to write. We can use some of the ideas in our lessons, we can write about interesting things dealing with teaching, projects and school. One special guest is Karolina, who is my student, very talented and confident. She will express students' feelings and ideas here.

Youth's councils in the Czech Republic

In the Czech Republic, there exists some youth's councils which allow children and young people to speak about problems at school/town/region, to organize something and so on.
I would like to write more about it:

At our school, there is a students' council. It should have 40 voted members (2 members from each class) and maybe some other members but not so many people come to meetings and work. In fact, there isn't more than 20 people which work and not all of them are voted members...
We meet once a week or two and our meetings are usually 45 minutes long (as one lesson). We speak about problems in the school and we say our ideas about what could help, we can also say what students in our class dislike (or like), and we organize some activities.
Our students' council have some problems to face (money, some teachers dont's respect us, people don't want to be in it, ...) but I think it works very well, surely we are quite successful and - in my opinion - it is great that it exists.

In our town, there is the vestry (the council) of children and young people. There should be at least 2 voted members from each school (usually from students' councils) but - again - not all people come and work...
We meet usually once a month at the town hall and we speak about problems in our town, about some activities, we organize some activities and competitions (usually with someone who help us, often it is the youth house Libertin).

Then there is a regional parliament of youth. In our region, the regional parliament is really new (in fact, it exists from beggining of this school year) and so far it doesn't work well but I believe it will everything move forward. (On Monday, we have second meeting so I'll know more then...)
Each regional parliament have its rules which say how many members may be there etc. Usually, it depends on how many town vestries are in the region. In our region, the number of members from each town depends also on population of the town the members are from (for example, Liberec, which has population of about 100 000 people, may have up to 11 members while Česká Lípa, which has population of about 40 000, may have only 8 members. Smaller towns may have less...
Regional parliament should meet once in about two months. People there usually speak about similar things as people in the town vestries but the things they speak about are problems and activities for all the region.

Then, there is National parliament of children and young people. Each region may have 6-8 members there. This parliament meets only once a year - in November - for a few days in Prague (which is, as - I suppose - you know, the capital of the Czech Republic).
Members of this parliament are division into five committees - foreign committee (which cares about international cooperation and sometimes organize some visits in other countries), methodical and conceptual committee (which cares about statut and some methodicses), media committee (which cares about publicity of this system (students' councils, town vestries, regional parliaments, National parliament) in the media), committee for the rights and the duties (which cares about - what else - rights and duties of children and young people) and cultural committee (which cares mainly about cultural programme of meetings).
At meeting of the National parliament people work in the committeeses. There is usually one topics and all committeeses work with this topic (in 2005 - when I was at the meeting - for example, it was projects for "Česká národní agentura Mládež" (Czech national agency Youth))

The last thing I want to mention is the praesidium of National parliament of children and young people. From each region, there are 2 members. These people meet each moth, for one week in Prague. They work on something there (this year, for example, they complete the projects and they have to send an application for grant). They also prepare the "big meeting" - the meeting of whole National parliament.



Well, all these councils and parliaments have some problems to face but they all work successfully. I am really glad that something like this may exist and exists.

eTwinning friends

My students like to have their real friends who they can write letters to. All those things are very new for them and they do not think only about projects, they want to have real friends. That is why, from time to time, we also exchange real postcards or photos to show the reality to them. They are open to new friendships, but they always demand to be twinned. At the moment we have several projects with different European countries and I must say that all of them are very successful. We have learned a lot about Greece and Poland and we are going to search new countries, too.

Cooperation with Turkey

This week I got a very interesting letter from a Turkish teacher Halis who has offered cooperation to my students. It will be for the first time when we have a project with a country which is not a member of the EU. I think that it is very important to help the country which would like to join us. We must not be xenophobic and we'd better try learn more about unknown. My students are ready to learn more about Turkey and to exchange letters with the Turkish students. We will see what the cooperation will bring and I hope that it will not fail. It is always so frustrating to tell my students that the cooperation has finished. They are full of optimism and they are eager to learn more.

Using forum during lessons

During lessons I am using the eTwinning web page for the projects with my twinned schools I have realized that inviting my students to the twinspace/ My Team/ is very useful, interesting for the students and helpful for me.

At the beginning it was not very easy at all and I had to create all the usernames and passwords for my students, after I had registered them, I sent them a message onto their email addresses.

Then I created a topic for the students and invited them into the forum. I can say that from the very beginning my students tried very hard, they were proud of their contributions and they also were very responsible because they could see their names under each of the short articles. Some of them thought up their own topics.

How happy they were when they saw also the contributions from our Greek school.

I have realized that storing all these contributions is important for me and I can use them again whenever I need them. I also can evaluate my students attempts later at home when I have more time to think about what they have written. Having an excellent ICT equipment in my classroom it is not a problem for me to show them their contributions in the time when they can't go to the computer room. So now we can combine email writing with the forum and I hope that in the future we will use more ICT tools together with my partners.