Now help Nellie and Maria to answer this question: What problems do we English teachers usually face?

Problems we English teachers usually face: Very few tuition’s hours per week Students are much more interested in mobile phones and TV reality shows than learning a foreign language Teenagers’ attention is absorbed by their *growing up* problems They often are restrained by shyness and fear of making mistakes Kids sometimes show low levels of self-esteem: “I’ll never be able to speak English!” Nellie and Maria realistically decided that the students’ average language level of English should be “lower intermediate”

Technology helps. Why? Because… young people were born and are growing up in a highly technological society it makes things more exciting and easier It helps people from all over the world communicate It breaks down cultural differences It’s fun! So Nellie set up a Moodle learning environment where students and teachers could communicate freely and easily! This is the U.R.L.: What’s Moodle? Go to next slide for the answer!!!

What's Moodle? Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. Moodle offers all the tools necessary to teachers and pupils for managing e-learning courses and for publishing documents and exercises. More important than anything else, a Moodle website is an Internet space where people can communicate and interact. The only problem is to make people LEARN how to use it. So we put up a page with instructions. Yes because meanwhile other people had joined our Moodle learning environment…. Read on…

The Comenius BACK project In September Maria had started collaborating to a European project: the Comenius BACK project Maria’s school (I.S. Galilei in Benevento, Italy) took part into the project with: –Adam Smith College (Kyrkcaldy, Scotland) –Escuela de Artes (Cuenca, Spain) –Realschule für Mädchen (Ausgburg, Germany) The four schools needed an interactive website for the collaborative project work In January Maria asked Nellie to share the moodle website with the Comenius BACK partners So a new course was added (Comenius BACK course) and the Israeli and Italian students started chatting and messaging with German, Scottish and Spanish ones!!! Let’s go back to the Israeli Italian project!!! This is a new *West Side Story*…

What we actually did! The project phases: 1.First the Israeli and Italian students joined the Moodle site and introduced themselves 2.Then they got enrolled in the “Apples from the desert forum” and discussed the meanings of the story written by Savyon Liebrecht 3.They got to know something more about each other in the “Student Introduction and Discussion Forum” 4.The discussions went on in the “Mushroom in the city” and “Winter: The City Lost in the Snow” forums, where they discussed Calvino’s stories 5.Nellie kept a journal of the works and constantly assigned new tasks!

6.Students started discussing non literary topics like festivals in their own countries. The Italian students did not know much about the Hebrew religion so Maria highlighted the common monotheistic origins of both Christendom and Hebraism. In particular the Israeli students told the story and customs of Channuka 7.The Italian students answered describing Christian Easter. 8.And then the Israeli students explained that also in their religion they celebrate Easter, even if it has a different meaning! The discussions involved descriptions of traditional dishes… ;-)

Problems Students, and sometimes teachers… found it difficult at first to get used to the Moodle learning environment. When left alone they did not know how to find their way through the hundreds of resources available in the site The dates of holidays in the two countries often did not match. So when the Italian school was closed the Israeli students were at work in the PC lab trying to establish contact with their Italian friends. Communication was generally asynchronous The Italian students live in villages where there are no fast Internet connections available. For this reason only very few of them could communicate from home and they could work only from the school labs (once a week at best)

Future developments of the project In May Israeli and Italian students will be chatting on line in a videoconference Communication will include the German, Spanish and Scottish students as well Next school year Nellie and Maria want to get on with the project as they have learned a lot about how to manage a collaborative project work with annexed technical problems The project will include songs and pop culture besides literature Maria and Nellie are thinking of making a video with the Israeli and Italian kids starring. How? Maybe a bit of video editing will help since a real (non virtual) meeting is not on schedule (even if it would be warmly welcome!) But this is another story we hope we will be able to tell next year on a new Mootle video conference session!!!