eLanguages creative collaboration for teachers globally

What is eLanguages? An online collaborative online tool for teachers globally, developed by the British Council and Rages Ltd for the Department for Education and Skills Multilingual (English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Japanese, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati and Hindi versions) Free at the point of use Enables teachers create and/or use collaborative resource-based projects Offers each project 100 MB of space

clear layout multiple languages structured projects hello pages project / resource categories

What are the benefits? Students … Teachers … Present their work to the world Learn from authentic resources Connect with and learn from peers Become global citizens Cultural awareness Language skills ICT skills Collaborate and create school links Access and use authentic resources Involve their students Feel confident and in control International dimension Student-centred learning Professional development

Why use eLanguages for school linking? It is a site specifically designed for school use Only verified teachers are allowed to have an account for creating and editing pages As the account holders are trusted, they are given a higher level of admin rights than similar sites Teachers are able to ensure that the site is 100% safe for students to use The site has a wide variety of tools under one roof, rather than having to learn the environments of a number of sites that only have one or two useful tools It has an effective search tool enabling teachers and students to quickly find the resource they need rather than drilling down a number of links Most significantly the site’s navigation tools and wizards are translated into the user’s native language making training much simpler

How does it work? 1 re-use existing resources collaborate on a project and create resources with teachers and students from other countries find a partner join a project 2 teacher How can I internationalise my classroom activities class start your own project 3 Learn from other teachers

Browse or re-use resources … such as for example Spanish resources, presentations, audio files, text files… no membership is required click to open

Join existing projects … find an interesting project, and join the project to create a school link and collaborate with a partner

Start your own project … create your own project idea and invite others to join your project

Student contributions Create forums to enable students to quickly and simply communicate a message without requiring an account Use forums to enable students to read and compare the answers of a variety of students at another school without the need for accounts

Example 1: What does that mean project one form is required to start a new project

First we ask the teachers to define project stages…

a comprehensive range of resources can be added to the project stages (movies, sound files, pictures, galleries, text, polls, web links) resources are added to the project page by teachers but can be created or sourced either by teachers or students

eLanguages project page the complete project with resources added to each stage

eLanguages project Class 1Class 2 teachers and their students create and add resources to each stage and learn from resources produced by their peers