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June 2010Ibaialde News 18

Some of the productions made during the year

Dear Ibaialde friends,

We feel very proud of your invitation to write in yourmagazine about what we have been doing during the year andwhat we think about it. Many of you maynot know what we are talking about, so wewill start from the very beginning.

It all sarted for us in a September morningwhen Mrs. Grzyb, our teacher of English,offered us to cooperate with some peersfrom Spain in a school project sponsoredby the European Union through theirEtwinning portal.

We and all our classmates really wanted toparticipate in the E-twinning project, we thought it would begreat fun. Now, when we look back, we can say that ourproject has been a great idea! It has given us lot of fun andknowledge. Of course, sometimes it's been hard, but the workhas been really rewarding because we've learnt many newthings we would have never learned just with the generalsyllabus and the usual activities.

The goal of the project was to make the students of both

schools work together and find out how similar or differentwe are. The name of our project is "So Far, So Near" and thesefour words say more than anything else. Our countries havedifferent languages, cultures, customs, climates... well, thelist might be endless, but although these differences are there,we have discovered we have many more things in common.

The first thing our teachers did was the set up of a virtualclassroom with Moodle Platform. There we were allregistered with a username and a password, then we wroteour personal profiles and soon we were able to start working

with a foreign colleague.

The first exercise we did was tointroduce ourselves to our peers. Wewrote short and not so shortdescriptions about ourselves: family,hobbies, home, … and even some of usrecorded some video productions thatwere offered to everybody as models.When everybody had introduced, westarted to write in the chat or send e-

mails to our partners. Now we were writing in detail aboutmany interesting things such as school, hobbies, and ourcountries. Soon we got closer than we expected at first. Somereal friendships were born very quickly!

In our second unit we were talking about "a person we reallyadmire". Everyone made a composition about her/his hero,who in many cases was our mom or granny. In the end of theunit we voted for a quality we considered the most important

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June 2010 Ibaialde News 18

in life. Most of the students, Spanish and Polish, chose ,and as the characteristics we most

value in a person. It shows that we admire similar features andwe are looking for them in our everyday lives.

In just a few days the snowball effect was there. Many of uswere chatting, writing emails, uploading photos to the blog,… and we were always practising our English and havingfun.

In this project there have been lots of activities, but for someof us the most important and then rewarding one has been on-line conversations via Skype. Firstly, there were hugeproblems with understanding, it was really stressful to try tounderstand what the other side was trying to say, but soonthings got better and our last conversations endedsuccessfully, with laughter. One of the many things we havelearned thanks to the project has been that we should realiseof the differences in accent we may face when we talk topeople in English because they will probably have verydifferent backgrounds, which means different accents, but wesoon learned that if we make a simple effort to understand wewill not have problems to communicate.

Some other activities included presentations about ourschools and teachers, traditions in our regions, but the bestmoment was at Christmas. We wished all the best forChristmas to our partners in Spain and prepared for them, andthen posted, a nice and big box with cookies and some cards.

Besides this we also made a video where we sang carols andtold them about the way we celebrate Christmas in Poland.

But we have also had the chance to show some other hobbiesand talents. Many students have uploaded photos to the blogor participated in the "Photo contest". In March there was alsoa "Video-karaoke contest". Participants who wanted todevelop their talents in the making of videos and takingphotos have had these two very special moments. It was verynice to see the best videos, and then the "Award Ceremony"we celebrated live on both countries thanks to Skype. Thisactivity with music showed that we have a similar taste inmusic and we value it as one of our bigger interests.

Then some partners started to have their own ideas, and that'show the Spanish-Polish- English Minidictionary was born.Finally, in May we have worked in pairs to create, throughour own wiki, some common free projects.

All these activities helped us to get on very well. Thanks toMoodle and all the connected essays and sub-projects we'veimproved our language skills. Also we have realised that,although we live in different countries, we have a lot incommon. We have discovered eTwinning as a modern way ofteaching, and we think it is fantastic. It integrates learning andhaving fun. We hope that in the future our nations will followthis way of developing tools which encourage cooperationamong the different peoples of the countries. Don't you think

it reallysounds great!

We wish we still keep in touch when the project ends.Your friends

frankgood-natured cheerful

Marysia DOLE

Marcelina BIENIAS

M

ŻYCH

Leszek ARZĘCKI

Last April our common projectwas awarded the European QualityLabel and will compete for BestEuropean Project

The Teachers

in Warsaw

Mr. Baile

Mrs. Grzyb

Mr. Grzyb