Hello my dear friends!
So wonderful to see your students posting in the student blog! Our lessons are now on Thursdays and today we were working on the ABCbooks. Some of our students have sent your students invitations to add Latvian translations to their words. We still need email addresses to the Swedish students to send the invitations. I have now invited all Gaida’s students.
If one student gets many invitations, you can always tell him or her to send an invitation to someone else in your group (if there is someone who didn’t get any invitations). You can add people from the upper right hand corner (share) of the google drive power point application. I think you might have to create gmail accounts for the students in order to edit the presentations, but it happens quite easily. Google Drive is a very useful tool for the kids in the future. And once to tell them where to go http://www.google.fi in this case, they will figure it out themselves. You are welcome to add pictures in the presentations, if you have some that are your own. We will play the ABCbooks in our school lobby and we will post them into the student blog when you are done with adding the Latvian and Swedish words, so there are copyright issues to consider.
Next Thursday we will be continuing with the ABCbooks and we have also started commenting on your students posts. I have told our students that they should comment on everyone’s post, so your students should be receiving about 14 comments on each post :) Well, it might be that we won’t have quite that many new things to say, but let’s hope there will be at least 8 comments on each post.
How about that Skype call? Next Monday 14.1. at 16.00 (15 for Catrin)? Or 15 (14 for Catrin?)
And remember to send me those account numbers.
Oh, and one more thing. There are soooo many posts in the student blog now that we have to use Categories. Whenever you post please ask the students to pick suitable Categories. In that way we can make folders. They should choose either Latvian Blog or Swedish Blog and then also other Categories that match the content of what they wrote about.
You know what ladies? I think we have achieved something amazing. Our students who have the lowest possible grade in English can’t stop writing in English now. As soon as we let them into the computer room they start writing and they wouldn’t want to go to the break at all. They just write for 90 minutes and when they leave they always have something in mind that they want to do next week.
I love this project! <3
Can’t wait to meet you!
Can I Help You? - Teacher Blog 
Annika, I can’t find your email address! Help !! I wanted to send you the email addresses of my year 7, but where to?
Yes, the idea of categories is good, I will need to look at it further with my students. We will write tomorrow our new year resolution :) – to lose weight?? and eat more vegetables?
Doing a project is always interesting because first of all we meet fantastic people who become our friends, and then, one can learn so much from a project! For me it is clear that participating with a year 7 class is much harder then with older kids. They are also not so experienced using different tools on the Internet, generally not so knowledgeable using the computer for WORK.
One last reflection: what a feeling when by ending the lesson the kids ask me: Catrin, should we send our work to the blog? or, Can’t we read the blog again, maybe somebody has posted something new on it?
Isn’t it COOL?? :)
Hi Catrin! There’s a list of students and their email addresses in GoogleDrive. It might be handy that you add the addresses there? So they are available for us all also if we need them later (emails get lost so easily). Only us teachers of course. So you get all the addresses as well if you also need them sometime. It might be that you already have the access to that list in your GoogleDrive-account but I’ll share it to you now to be sure. The mail with the link to that document will be in your telia-address soon.
Katriina
Dear ladies,
it is becoming more and more exciting. there are questions from the students what we need to do next, the 9th grade girls yesterday had a meeting in my class – how to post on the blog.
Annika, are you going to match the students in groups for this ABC book? I added my other students’ addresses. can you see them?
lets try our skype meeting on Monday I can be online from 3 p.m. What is better time for Catrin?
I’ll send the bank account via email.
Till Monday,
Gaida
P.S.It’s been snowing for 2 days and hopefully I can go skiing at the weekend!
Our kids are working on the ABC book, Felix L and David W are really keen on translating every word into Swedish. Nice to hear their comments as well: “look at that! It looks so great, but how do they pronunciate that word? We need to ask them, maybe we can add some audio file to the presentation!”
What do you think?