eLene2learn Final Conference Capitalising on 3 years work/the eLene2learn final report Olympia Befa, Ellinogermaniki Agogi 10 October 2014, Barcelona

Introduction  My name is Befa Olympia and I work in the English Department of Ellinogermaniki Agogi.  I teach in Secondary Education that is to say junior and senior high school.  3 years ago I introduced blogging and videos to my classrooms and now I am here to present my experiences and at the same time the lessons learnt from the eLene2learn project in which I had the honor to participate.

 We in the eLene2learn team started working in the usefulness of the ICT tools in all levels of education and their contribution to the transition of students to higher levels of education.  We decided upon a variety of case studies, we started to implement them in our educational institutions and to our amazement the results were more than satisfactory

Lessons Learnt  Self–regulation  Self–assessment  Communication  Thinking, problem solving, decision making  Being creative  Working with others  Motivation and challenge

 These are the skills students honed and acquired through the procedure of using ICT tools in the classroom  Social media  Digital media  E-portfolio and blogs Made our lessons inspiring and our students willing to learn more and surely better prepared for their transition to higher education.

We made mistakes since at the beginning we were not completely familiarised with the tools or the skills required. We realised that we need better planning and pre- setting of goals, aims and objectives. Both teachers and students need to adjust before they adopt the idea of ICT in class BUT once we address any given challenges we realise that Blogging for example is more free form, more “accident prone” but more alive!!! Beyond our ideas and experience a new approach evolved and it introduced fresh winds of change into the classroom

We are sure that with ICT tools in the classrooms  More stories will be told  More students will be taught  More teachers will be praised

Blogging and videos in Ellinogermaniki Agogi  In an era full of digital native people we in Ellinogermaniki Agogi try to implement new methods of teaching and conveying messages  So it all happened when I introduced the certificization.blogspot.com (bad and difficult name I know but now we know better than that and next time it’s going to be sth easier and more catchy since we learnt that the name of a blog itself plays an imperative role)  We created the blog with my post–proficiency students since we are in a never ending quest of ways to keep the level of English of our students high after having achieved academic goals.

A blog?  The initial idea of the blog was to help weaker students reach the proficiency goal. Weaker students were asking questions and stronger ones were more than pleased to answer!  Competencies such as self-regulation and self- assessment were highly built up while more academic skills were also honed since their English should reach perfection either to acquire a degree or help the ones who want to do so.  We teachers realised that the blog was a great incentive for all students to participate and work more!

A blog?  And then the blog trend started to spread  And then students wanted to use it differently and provide more food for thought  And then we launched a campaign against bullying, exchanging ideas and experiences  And older students decided to talk about social issues like HIV positive people at work and post articles regarding the above and other topics  And the blog became a space full of ideas and different perceptions on different issues  And we teachers also enjoyed our students being more and more engaged, thoughtful and better at English through an alternative way of teaching and learning.

A blog and a video?  And we did not want to stop.  We wanted to make it a more interactive activity.  So we started visualising our ideas, our messages our stories!!!!  (Relevant videos)