[2013 1o & overall] The "rainbow village" project

1o Ευρωπαϊκό Βραβείο eTwinning στην κατηγορία "12-15 ετών" και Bραβείο για το καλύτερο έργο eTwinning της χρονιάς (overall prize 2013)

Σχολείο: Δημοτικό Σχολείο Γριζάνου Τρικάλων

Εκπαιδευτικός: Παρασκευή Μπελόγια (ΠΕ06)

Συνεργαζόμενα σχολεία:

Collège Jean Lacaze (Γαλλία)
Sc. Gimn. Nr.29 Galati (Ρουμανία)
St Michael's Roman Catholic Voluntary Aided Comprehensive School (Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο)
Yıl Ortaokulu (Τουρκία)
Istituto Comprensivo Statale di Sermide (Ιταλία)
Gymnázium M. M. Hodžu (Σλοβακία)
Zespół Szkół w Dąbrowie (Πολωνία)

Καρτέλα έργου: 58043

Περιγραφή: Motto : “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world” Nelson Mandela The « Rainbow village project » enhanced the cognitive development of primary and high school students through opportunities to develop communicative competence, interact meaningfully and scaffold peers (Levine, 2004). Through five tasks (Puren, 2006), active learners from France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Turkey and the U.K. collaborated with fellow community members. Thus, they created their fictive yet culturally grounded world with its laws, its mayor, its flag and its anthem. This global simulation (Debyser, 1980) enabled them to interact and share their experiences while learning a language. They interacted to know each other, discussed every day life topics and discovered some of their customs. ICT tools were carefully chosen depending on the task : e-books were created, vokis were recorded, videos were posted on youtube, polls were conducted. All these productions are hosted on a blog.

Twinspace: http://new-twinspace.etwinning.net/web/p58043/welcome

Links:

The "Rainbow Village project" offers an innovative and creative approach to EFL learning and teaching for three reasons: educational , pedagogical and didactical. Our students 1) - had a glimpse at their partner countries' values and lifestyles, thus developing their intercultural competence - reflected on society as part of "education to citizenship" - increased their oral and written abilities through greater exposure to English.

2) - practiced the four competences with people of their age, thus greater motivation led to improved productions - reflected on their strategies thus participating to the learning process - experimented new learning environments : working with ICT, with their peers or in guided autonomy - used their creativity and imagination - developed ICT skills 3) developed specific phonological, grammatical, lexical, strategic and pragmatic skills and abilities.

This project was led in compliance with the directives of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.All the tasks were completed during the school lessons. A detailed schedule was carefully planned and it followed the themes to be studied: introducing oneself (physical description), talking about one's environment (one's country and one's village), describing oneself, talking about one's job, expressing orders, expressing likes/dislikes ). So, lexical and grammatical input was first provided and regularly put into practice through the five tasks. In order to complete some of the activities, cooperation with teachers of other subjects, such as Art, Music, Citizenship and Environmental studies was necessary. Teachers from our school and volunteer teachers from other schools were willing to help us complete some of the tasks. Extra teaching material (Language Corner) was made available to students with a special focus on the teaching of cognitive and metacognitive strategies.

The blog will not be closed so that students can keep on commenting on their mutual works. We plan to develop this project further. We intend first to use some of the material published as a basis for learning (description of our school, country identity card, for example). It would be great if students could interact in a ‘Second Life’ environment but we are still looking for free hosting (Second Life is a 3D world simulation http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US). We would also like to have our students reflect on how interculturality can affect exchanges. In this respect, we plan to register them to the project CULTURA platform as a complement to the e-twinning one (http://cultura.mit.edu/). Finally our project was advertised in magazines, educational meetings and professional newsletters.

Teachers : - presented project to school community - prepared a detailed time schedule - prepared reference documents : learning environment, ICT tools - designed twinspace and created login accounts - assigned responsibilities to some students (publishing material, creating videos etc) - designed tasks together (through chatroom + teacher's room) - wrote leading stories - reviewed time schedule, when necessary - updated project diary - selected tools according to tasks - opened a blog and regularly updated it - advertised project (professional newsletter, school magazines, teachers'forum) Students : - created presentations - prepared e-books (new identities/avatars, Rainbow Village tourist guide, the constitution book, recipe book) - created video and audio files - prepared scrapbook (haandmade + smilebox), - manufactured model of village - made drawings ( hand-made pictures, maps, flag) - evaluated productions through voting (identity card, tourist guide, model, flag, Mayor) - wrote comments in guestbook

As explained before, we opened a blog where texts along with images, videos, image galleries and attachments were posted. The use of ICT tools made the activities more pleasant, attractive and fun. Our students enjoyed recording their new identities on a voki and they read with great pleasure their e-books. Organizing polls to evaluate productions developed the students'evaluation capacities while actively involving them in the project. Access to the blog promoted interactivity as all participants could publish their work and react to other participants'productions. Various tools were used creatively: prezi/ppt/smilebox for presentations, issuu for publishing our e-books, movie-maker for creating videos, audacity and camtasia studio for voice recording and editing, vokis for self-presentation quizzes, edu.glogster for interactive posters, sp-studio.de for the creation of avatars, goAnimate for animated videos, storybird for making a story-book, wallwisher, answergarden.ch, google forms and pollmo for evaluating the project, tripline for building our European map.

The participants showed an equal commitment to the "Rainbow Village project". They shared roles and responsibilities and cooperated to make it a success. They also understood very well its aims and objectives. Students opened to the world and showed interest in new cultures. They were strongly involved, especially the younger ones, both emotionally and creatively and they showed deep concern for the success of their project. All the project members were excited to take part in a real- world simulation project-game and create an ideal place for them. Both teachers and students had their own role in this simulation (e.g teachers were members of ‘the Council of the Elders’). They learnt to build a community from scratch, respect the others and set the rules for a peaceful living. Through this project they developed new knowledge in arts and ICT.

Our project had been selected out of 230 other projects from all over France and received a certificate from the Forum des Enseignants Innovants (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5zfopa2f6kniz3b/certificate.jpg)