Happy new year to Latvia and Sweden!
We started school today in Porvoo and also had this year’s first lessons with our Can I Help You -group. Our local newspaper Vartti has a page for schools and wishes every school to send some photos and texts the students have taken and written. One of our teachers responsible for the co-operation with Vartti asked if our group was interested in writing about our course and the forthcoming trip to Latvia when it is our school’s turn to write now in January. On today’s lessons the students were writing their article and choosing photos they want to add on it. The article will be in the paper after two weeks. We can post you a photo of it here then. :)
The students were also working on their ABC-books that they started before the holidays. The ABC-books are PowerPoint-presentations with Finnish and English words. The idea is to share these with your students in GoogleDrive so that your students can add Latvian and Swedish words. That way we will have common dictionaries with all the languages we have been using during this project. I guess our students will be ready to post you the links to these ABC-books already next Thursday. We hope that you will have time to continue the work our students have started. They will get the experiences of working together overseas (in groups of about three students – one from each country) and using GoogleDrive which we as teachers think is a very useful tool for the students to learn. Using GoogleDrive is very simple and this task doesn’t take much time. Via the link you have straight access to Drive and this particular ABC-book – the Drive even saves automatically all the changes you make. :) We already have Gaida’s group’s email addresses – could you Catrin send us your email addresses?
Hopefully you have had a relaxing Christmas!
Can I Help You? - Teacher Blog 
I find the idea of the ABC book very interesting and nice. Not only the content, but the way of collaboration as we, in our school in Sweden, try to convince our students to use google drive for sharing files and for co-operation. So, this idea with the ppt on google drive actually fits very well into our planes of using the Internet on a better way, not only for looking up things in Wikipedia or for facebook but for REAL TEAM work. Until now we have used google drive for sharing Word documents, so we look forward trying this function with ppt. Everything the students learn hereby, can be used in school and free-time. You have surely the same problems with presentations in groups as we: somebody of the group is absent and the kids can’t do their presentation, or they live far away from each other and can’t meet for a group work. With google drive we have a great tool in our hand- hopefully the students will discover its advantages sooner or later.
Email adresses? Yes, of course. Sorry for not being so active and cooperative during the last months, it has a family/personal reason. It doesn’t mean that the Swedish kids or I did not follow the blog or did not work… We have tried to publish so many things
….and right now I pushed the button before I have finished my entry. :)
so, once more: We have try to add all the ready entries onto the blog, we hope that you will like them.
Happy New Year to everybody also via this blog!
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