eTwinning project idea

Dehbia, Evelyn and I adapted and elaborated the Walls Talking Poster idea into what is to become a 2 month eTwinning project.

The idea is that students describe what really matters in life using a combination of images and texts and share and compare class production.

Tools to be used are:
Twinspace user walls, Twinspace and/or class blog, Twinspace forum, SP Studio, Big Huge Labs, others.

Aims:
Connect with a partner from another country and collaboratively explore each other's culture and view of life.
Reflect about things that matter and share and compare class production.

Work process:
Step 1 : Introduction (creating avatars & editing Twinspace profiles)
Step 2 : Choosing partners and connecting with them.
Step 3 : Creating an image/text combination about something that matters to you
Step 4 : Checking production, commenting and voting for the best three posters.

Expected results:
A collection of posters displayed in the schools or on the web.

eTwinning in France

From the 13 to 15 October I was a lucky participant of the Hungarian-French-Slovene eTwinning PD Workshop. It took place in the lovely French town of Reims in the land of Champagne.

The workshops included:
• Getting familiar with the project work basics,
• Examples of good practice,
• Getting familiar with the eTwinning portal and Elluminate,
• Networking, creating projects and registering partnerships.
One of the examples of good practice came from Slovenia – Tatjana Gulič from the Preska primary school wowed the audience with a 'Your Tube' project idea linking music and physics classes in two Slovene schools – a primary and a secondary one. The project idea was developed in collaboration with Lorena Mihelač, a music teacher from the Metlika secondary school.
The main idea is exploration of scrap tubes from various materials – during the physics classes students study them from the point of view of physics and during the music classes they write and play music using them.
Participants tried out the 'tubes' – it was a lot of fun and sure worked!
Inspired by great examples we rolled up our sleeves, exchanged our project ideas and started connecting. We registered a number of new eTwinning projects which should connect Slovene, Hungarian and French students and teachers in the current year. 
Such eTwinning seminars are a wonderful experience – I'd say especially for teachers who already have some experience with collaborative project work and are interesting in finding an international partner.
I presented the Things that matter idea from the Walls Talking project and was then approached by two lovely teachers from Reims, Evelyne and Dehbia, with whom we developed an eTwinning project idea and registered it on site. I’ll post about our activities on the class blog.
Lots of interesting happens behind the walls of out schools – it's nice to be able to see and learn about these things – and get inspired dip our toes. All you need to do to attend such a workshop is check out the national agency’s site in your country – in Slovenia it's Cmepius.

Exploring slideshow options

Many interesting photo and comment contributions have been pooled within the Walls Talking project. On the project site and in the Flickr group. The flickr group pool contains is a complete collection of photos gathered so far.

I was wondering about the simplest way of displaying thematically related photos with pertaining info and comments... The only way to do some of this in Flickr (photo + info slideshow) seems to be to tag items in the pool and then share the tag-generated slideshow. Or am I missing something?

I've gathered some of the sets here and here.

Flickr slideshows look good and have this great embed function, but to see photo related info viewer needs to watch them full page with the 'show info' option on.

So I was wondering about how to display things by showing more information about contributions more interactively and I remembered diigo slideshows I once played a bit with and liked a lot.

This is my attempt number 1 - a longer Listen to the Walls Talking diigo slideshow covering more or less the same topics as the above Flickr sets. The default transition speed is rather slow, but you can always use the buttons below to move on faster or speed it up bottom right.

I like diigo a lot. Miss an embed function but appreciate a lot the fact that the slideshow is interactive and can include any webpage.

Why do I blog?

Jen asked why do we blog in the Webheads YG. This was my reply.
I don't blog much and faaar from regularly but enjoy it a lot - and also enjoy going back to what I've done.
My blogs are my online spaces where I occasionally retreat to reflect, record, share, or simply keep things I care about. I've got a cyberkitchen, a cybermill, a cybergarden and a cyberattic. Even though the first two are a bit more alive than the others I don't think I'll ever pronounce dead any of them.
I like the way conversation is kept open this way and people can get in touch with you. I am not a well organized person by nature so I also like a lot the way contents on blogs can be simply and meaningfully organized using tags. It comes handy when you need to show sbd. what you are working on, or what you've done/planned to do at some point, and to aggregate contents from various sources.
I like the way you can feel the writers behind their blogs, easy follow numerous blogs using an aggregator of some sort, and learn so much and meet so many fascinating people that it's incredible.

Online safety basics

Just sharing here a presentation I created for collaborative online learning group led by Viljenka Šavli within the national project called e-Šolstvo, which promotes e-empowerment in schools across Slovenia. It's in Slovene.

Varnost na spletu

View more presentations from sasasirk.

Garbage related sites that make you think

Another English version of my post from the Smeti Ning.
Plastic bags are one of the first things that comes to my mind in connection with garbage.
1. Battle of the bags is an interesting American documentary comparing the use of plastic and paper bags – which are more damaging for the environment? What has been done so far in various places to fight unnecessary pollution, what we can do ourselves... The documentary is split into short 1-2minute chapters, is partlčy interactive and I find it useful for English listening comprehension (B1+) as well as a good starting point for a simple research into our bag policy.
2. The Battle of the Bag – is about 40 minute long Canadian documantary about plastic bags.. lots of interesting facts – production, history, issues, responses, ...
3. Series of shocking photos of dead birds from a remote Pacific island away from civilization – their rottening dead bodies are full of plastic garbage from the ocean. The island is 2000 miles from the closest continent.
4. http://explorethecycle.com/ is a nice, animated visualisation of the recycling process at a materials recovery facility – an easy to follow animation consisting of short chapters

Our garbage - our concern

This is an English version of a post I've written in Slovene at the Ning site called Smeti, naše skrbi (Our garbage, our concern). The site has recently been created by my friend Vili (and will, sadly, need to be relocated due to Ning's new business policy).
The idea behind the site is to promote class collaboration around the topic of garbage - within and between schools and cultures. Teachers have been encouraged to post their project ideas to the Ning and I've posted this one:

DIY sites: practice English + learn about cool recycling ideas + connect with others

At http://www.instructables.com/ one can find numerous DIY ideas concerning recycling various materials. So why not directing students over to this site – they'll easily find there interesting and feasible ideas to carry out in practice – cross-curricularly within their school or reeaching out to other national or international partners in crime.
Interesting ideas could for example be gathered together at an English class and if necessary translated. Individually or within some practically oriented courses students could then create things and maybe organize an exhibition, an auction, or find some other meaningful or useful place for them (e.g. Biotechnical school students creating a scarecrow out of old CDs and setting it up on their school field...)
Older students could perhaps gather together interesting project ideas during their English class and pass them on for younger groups to create them... (Suzana and I have been thinking along these lines during one of teacher training sessions – she teaches young learners in primary school, I teach college students).
With this idea in mind I went to the before mentioned website and checked out some possible ways of recycling paper. I was amazed by numerous ideas there and by simplicity of this one here http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Paper-Beads/ - so I emptied my paper basket bin and used the paper and wooden beads to create this:

Here's a longish list of various DIY sites ... Worth checking out, I think.
Also worth checking out is http://earthcast.posterous.com/ - a great collection of nice green project ideas for teachers and students.

Copyright and right to copy

Image created using Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator

It's been 300 years since the world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. The British Council gathered ideas about copyright from renown thinkers of our time and posted them here.
I like Cory Doctorow's defense of our right to copy.

"We are that which copies. Three or four billion years ago, by some process that we don't understand, molecules began to copy themselves. We are the distant descendants of those early copyists - copying is in our genes. We have a word for things that don't copy: 'dead'."

A must see presentation on this topic from 2002 is Lawrence Lessig's free culture.

Copyright at SIRIKT2010

I attended this year's Sirikt conference and participated in a round table discussion on copyright in Slovenian education together with renowned Slovene copyright lawyer experts Miha Trampuž, Mojca Pečar and Katarina Krapež.
I did a bit of thinking and reading on this topic in preparation for this event and saw that the more I read the more questions I ended up with... It's true, educators, kids and web folks in general often don't remember to credit authors, cite sources, and ask permissions for publishing things online... I think mostly unintentionally, because we tend to do things fast these days and do them the way we see others do them.
My schoolmate at secondary school had this fabulous T-shirt saying 'no school, no job, no problem' - if you can't tell right from wrong you are blissfully unaware of mistakes you make... it was sort of along these lines that my thoughts rambled as I was trying to make sense of the copyright act restrictions.
As I said, the more I read the more questions I had… Many of them were kindly answered during the round table discussion and earlier workshop given by Katarina, still many remain unclear.
There are no national borders on the web… which is just great. I understand I need to follow Slovene copyright law in Slovenia – also when I use foreign copyrighted works? E.g. I think that according to the Slovene law I could freely use copyrighted music in a non-commercial school performance as long as I credited the authors and cited my source… I’m not sure I could use e.g. American copyrighted music the same way here…
Theory and practice are a challenge to match if you are not a lawyer.
Katarina, a cc advocate, mentioned that people sometimes surprisingly know more about cc than about the copyright law. I don't find that too surprising since cc terms are written way more humanely and are a much appreciated successful attempt to reconcile the legalese with the language understood to common web folks. I'm a big fan of the 'for dummies' trend and think we should all create meaningful contents for our target users (teachers too ;-)) if we expect them to take it seriously.
Here's a lovely view I from my hotel window:

Webheads in Poreč

Today was a very special day. Miha's wonderful mum took care of our two little monsters (now sound asleep in their monster beds), while Miha and I drove to Poreč, Croatia, and met up with Rita and Hector from Rosario, Argentina. My Rita the webhead, a dear dear online friend and partner! Incredible as an afternoon like this would have seemed to me less than 3 months ago, it's just happened today.
Rita is just the way I imagined her. Lively. Full of joy of life. Wonderful to talk to. With her and Hector and Miha we talked about life and work and the world. About borders and cultures and wars and politics. About friendship, curiosity, and serendipity. About the webheads. It was a beautiful waning summer day. And the world got really really small for awhile. :-)
Here are some of the photos Miha took - I only remembered to take his when we got back home (shame on me).

Morocco photos

This is my Morocco Flickr set

This is Frans' Morocco Flickr set. He's a very talented photographer, he also documented many of his beautiful pics, matching names and faces. With a little help from the iearn community, most of the faces on pics could get names.

And this is the iEARN flickr group some of us flooded. :-)

Morocco reflections 3 - my pres

My presentation was scheduled on the last day of the conference. A fair number of people turned up and seemed interested in a graffiti sharing idea. I talked a bit about what inspired me to start the project, a bit about my partners in crime (esp. my dear webheads and Rita's CAEB class and pm and my class and I4E folk and sdutsj and mih and iatefl slo and EFL University and ... :-)), about the project tools and about where the project has taken us so far. We've been basically collecting and sharing graffiti and stories behind them and exploring our countries and cultures, spreading over all sorts of cyberspaces.
Our society is doing very well building all sorts of walls around us - physical and mental, it is also doing very well using and abusing all those walls, and the natural walls too, for all sorts of purposes; artistic and less artistic ones. Walls protect our ideas, culture, property, they divide and separate mine from yours, right from wrong, us from them; and they reflect urban responses of people inhabiting those spaces. Their passions, frustrations,beliefs, views. By listening to the walls around us we can learn more about the world around us and also about ourselves. What do I see? What do I hear? Do I care to see at all? Or hear? Should I?
It's stories of national heroes and it's stories of everyday people. It's drugs and wine and politics and sports. It's the land and the culture. It's funny writings and those that hurt. Many can be seen or heard in different ways and can as such be used as departing points for discussions.
Do looks matter that much?
Why aren't there more women in politics?
Does violent music mean violent people?
Often it is difficult to draw the line between the right and the wrong, humour and bullying, art and vandalism... and this means - talking. And talking in an EFL class is good, isn't it? Especially talking about stories from the walls of our schools, streets, towns... because these tell stories of people from these schools, streets, towns. And because these people matter.
Funny thing I noticed as soon as I set foot on AUI campus - there were lovely murals here and there but no graffiti anywhere. It confused me. I thought there were talking walls everywhere where there are people. Thought wrong it seems. But I guess the fact that AUI is a prestigious university not open to general public has something to do with it. I found talking walls alright in other places in Morocco. It made me wonder though - are there countries or cultures where you can't find graffiti on the walls?
I have been learning a lot all the time by paying attention to graffiti around me. Perhaps I'll try to focus more on things like prejudice, nationalism, intolerance (if my next groups are interested...) Or other things, we'll see...You can find any topic on the wall.... so I
hope to continue with the project in the future too. It has been included on the iEARN site, so perhaps there will be other teachers/classes joining the ride. :-)
description: http://media.iearn.org/projects/wallstalking
forum: http://foro.iearn.org/iearnforums/wallstalking/
Flickr gallery: http://www.flickr.com/groups/wallstalking/pool/show/

Morocco reflections 2 - nice presentations

Some presentations still stuck to the back of my mind are:

A day in a life project by Chris Baer

Chris will set 2 days during the coming school year, during which interested teachers with classes from all over the world are invited to document their life during that day in writing and photos (natural, ordinary photos preferred to 'pose for the camera' kind of photos) and share these stories online. Students are asked to be careful not to invade privacy of other people. This here is the iearn forum link of the project http://foro.iearn.org/webx/.ee70728/
I plan to invite my students along, it should be fun. Chris says he already has confirmations from classes from Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, Israel (Palestine), Kenya, Morocco, Netherlands, Pakistan, Ukraine, USA and Yemen.

Copy Right or copy wrong by Diane Charlton Midness and Anindita Dutta Roy

A nice overview of basic guidelines for ethical and responsible use of media - not an easy topic to be delivered in a commn-sense friendly way, but the copyright girls did it very much so by asking questions of things we/people do and whether it is right or wrong to do them that way. They then provided explanations and guidelines to what often seemed to be divided audience. There is no global copyright protection all over the world, which additionally conmplicates things. Well, one useful thing I've learned is that using copyrighted photos in acadamic presentations falls under Fair use. Diane posted her slides to the iearn forum too http://foro.iearn.org/webx?230@@.1eaee4e8

The Bridge of Generations by Manal Fitiani - Lina Daher;

The project is about connecting the youth and the old in East Jerusalem - the young generation teaches the great grands how to use computer - students and their great grands choose 1 topic and they covered it learning along computer skills (traditional food, etc.). This is a really nice way of bringing together the young spending too much time behind their computers and the old, feeling lonely and out of touch with the modern world.
I think we could use this idea at our school too - ours is a technically oriented school centre, home to computer science secondary school and informatics vocational college among numerous other schools. Instead of teaching their great grands, students could perhaps also instruct seniors in the nearby old people's home or interested people taking classes at The Third Age University (http://www.univerzazatretjeobd-drustvo.si/english.html). I can see numerous possibilities here - in addition to helping old people explore topics they are interested in, perhaps also record things people want to share with the world, help them connect with their dear ones who may not live close to them, perhaps help them find a long lost relative overseas.... who knows. I think everybody learns a great deal by teaching others. And by helping others. And technology can do so much for us these days...

There were generally 6 concurrent sessions each time - and no repeats, so I missed some things.

Morocco reflections 1 - meeting friends

It's been weeks since my return from Morocco, impressions have settled down a bit so it's time to pour some of them out of my head and onto the web. :-)
It was an amazing experience - 430 people from 53 countries of the world - the north, the south, the east, the west - the young, and the young at heart. In blue jeans, in national costumes. Waving flags, playing music, singing songs, dancing, sharing experience, connecting.
And there were Webheads too! :-) Isabel, Nour Eddine, Mbarek and Claudia. We set aside a few hours for lunch one day, they flew with the speed of light. Such nice people! Such great moments! Nour Eddine is an amazing organizer - thinking of 200 things at the same time, always helpful, always with a smile on his face...

The Moroccans hospitality and thoughtfullness made sure everybody felt at home in Ifrane. They were so considerate all the time. Nour Eddine and Mbarek and Othmane and Said and Latife and Youssef and Aziz and Mohamed and... all those Morocccan boys and girls who were always there for us. I'll never forget it. I've learned so much from them. Of life in the desert. Of online learning. Of enjoying teaching. Of islam. Of diversity. Of respect. Of tolerance. Of perseverance.

It was also cool to get to know Slovene iEARN team - Alenka and Darja and Nives and Dušan and Gregor. It's funny to get to know colleagues from a town an hour away from yours.... in Africa! And learn there about what they do back home... an hour away from mine... :-).



I was really impressed by Darja's presentation - she did so many cool things with her young learners - collaborations, exchanges, performances, videos, you name it!

And Dušan's part was fun too - he uses delayed video in his physical education classes to show kids the mistakes they do when playing basketball or volleyball or performing certain moves. Image is worth a thousand words and video saves repeating Dušan all those thousands of words again and again. Judging from what I've seen on those videos Dušan showed, kids seem to really like checking a recording of themselves working on a task.

Gregor's part was interesting because it was an overview of introduction of Moodle in Slovene primary and secondary schools. I was part of an early phase of this programme too some 4 years ago. Together with a bunch of other colleagues we were walked through the Moodle basics - the technical part. I was fascinated by Moodle from the start, still use it today - partly because I have to, it's school policy, and partly because I still like it ok - in combination with other web based services it makes a cosy cyberspace. Gregor's overview of introduction of Moodle was top down, so it was nice to gain some broader insight into this national project. Being a teacher and a Moodler I find it interesting to observe mixed first responses of my colleagues - many see value in Moodle and play with it - many seem to feel the need for more pedagogy - technology is cool, but it needs to serve the purpose. Another issue is time... seems to kind of fly faster in cyberspace, and this is a problem for a busy teacher. People grab things that help them save some time... not so much things that take more of their time. ... but through this moodle project teachers are getting familiar with this cms, support communities are developing, and online learning is emerging. All in all I think this Moodle thing has been a huge project making a difference not just on paper but also in Slovene schools.

Flying to Morocco

Got up at 5.30 am, kissed my boys goodbye and went to the Venice airport to catch my flight to Rome. Miha took me there and stayed with me until the check-in. Half the time I fought back tears – not used to going places without my boys.
Landed in Rome alright and after some confusion managed to find the right check-in place for Casablanca. Rome airport is funny. At lunchtime people at the ticket counter simply left for lunch for an hour...leaving noone at counter to help out passengers in need of service.
Arrived to Casablanca a few hours later and then from then on to Fez. Could not find iEARN folks at the airport, but kind people there called the emergency number I had in my pocket and some 15 minutes later Latife and another gentelman arrived to pick up me and also a nice group from Yemen.

The ride in car lasted for some 50 mins, it was nice to see so many people of all ages out in the streets - wearing traditional clotes, modern, all sorts. Chatted with Latife, Mona, Fatima and Nissmh on the way, all sorts of things –about life in Morocco, Yemen, Slovenia, islam, the projects we have been involved in... Before checking in at the University campus, we made a quick stop at the centre – all the shops were alive at 22 pm. Did not buy any food – thought there would be dinner waiting for me but thought wrong and went to bed with a rumbling stomach.
Anyway, the room is nice and has free internet access. Got connected as soon as I got in and found all the sockets and caught my Mih online. J

It's nice to get a new toy every now and then...

... or even just borrow one for awhile, to t least get a taste of it.
I'm fooling around with a HP mini I borrowed from a friend. A neat little thing. It's both - big and small enough to be useful. I want one too!

TMI

Checking my Google reader recently I liked these quotes concerning TMI - too much information:
'I’m proud of saying I don’t know much but I know how to get to know what I don’t know.' CogDog
I like following CogDog's posts a lot. The other quote is by Clay Shirky and was contributed by Dean in the comment area 'It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure'.
I recently read Shirky's 'The power of organizing without organizations' - liked it so much I read it twice. Yet need to watch his TED talk.
I admire people who feel comfortable keeping up with the pace of life around them. Is this something one can learn? I'm still working on figuring out a recipe for me.

Going to Ifrane

I'm getting ready for a little bit more than a week in Morocco's Middle Atlas town called Ifrane. Annual iEARN conference is taking place there from 18th-25th July. I'm thrilled about meeting there Isabel, Mbarek and Nouredine - 3 webhead friends from Brazil and Morocco. I'm all excited about the trip but also not quite happy about staying away from my boys for 9 long days. There will be 4 other Slovene iEARNers in Morocco; Nives, Dušan, Darja and Gregor. I'm presenting the Walls Talking project and where it has taken us so far.

Wallstalking presentation

I've been mostly busy cooking over at the wallstalking site and in our class blog recently. Here are the slides I made for the Integrating Technology for Instruction and Learning ning group.

Listen To The Walls Talking

View more presentations from sasasirk.

Starting a graffiti project

Rita and I are launching a graffiti project called Listen to the Walls Talking. Anyone interested is warmly invited to join in. The project site, wiki and Flickr group have just come alive.

The idea behind the project is to collect and share graffiti. If other interested teachers, students, people spread across the cyberspace respond by posting graffiti photos and related info, this could turn into a nice project of the wall/s/talking in our schools, streets, towns, countries, world. Sketches, squiggles, doodles and other more sophisticated street art around us is the part of public spaces usually walked by, unnoticed by people.

Collecting graffiti from our walls, desks chairs and sharing them could provide us with a picturesque collection of expressions of wisdom/boredom/enthusiasm/dissatisfaction etc. from different places. This could perhaps be revealing in quite unexpected ways and could provide us with many interesting possibilities for further interpretations, explorations and manipulations.

This project is open to anyone interested, and will run for as long as there is interest. Anyone is invited to join in (individuals, teachers, classes, students...) and/or help spread the word.

There's not much to be seen yet, what is there is the result of the warm response of my friends (Rita, Kay, Vida and last but not least my Miha, who kindly created the site (said he needed an excuse for fooling around with some new toys... will need to give him more suggestions for excuses in the future ;-)).

Please have a look here and/or here, tell me what you think, and feel free to join in and help spread the word. The more, the merrier :-).