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Obviously, it is much more fun for students to actually use the language they are learning as a tool for communication, rather than as a bunch of grammar rules over which to stumble. 2.2 “Looking into each other’s kitchen” The teachers who participated in our project all took part in visits to each other’s schools. We have felt these visits to be an absolutely essential, if not crucial for a successful co-operation. It has become very clear that first of all the collaborating colleagues have to get to know each other, have to establish good relations, in fact have to make friends with each other, so that there is sufficient mutual trust for the project to take off. You have to know that what you have agreed upon, will be carried out by the other party and vice versa.
Group photo, Cheb January 2003 A real bonus in a project such as this is finding out that in spite of totally different teaching practices and cultural barriers, you can be an inspiration to each other across borders. In this project we learned that one of the partner schools actually provided all their teachers with small offices attached to their own classrooms, and cooked meals at school were the norm. How surprised most of us were to find out this was the case somewhere in Europe! 2.3 Exchanging and developing ideas A successful e-mail project inspires its participants. In the course of the exchange taking place, teachers and students hit on ideas which can then be carried out when the next groups of students start exchanging e-mail messages. E.g. links are found which students can visit:
Organising meetings for participating teachers during a year of exchanging e-mails is therefore essential and very fruitful. 2.4 Opening up the Internet for Adult learners The participants included relatively young ‘adults’ and older language learners (‘real adults’). Particularly for the real adult learner it is an advantage to do an e-mail project because it forces them to make use of a medium which may still be rather a mystery to them. This is both a challenge and an advantage, since the language teacher has to act as both IT instructor and language coach. A double role which is certainly a challenge! “Dear Marketa, how are you_ I tell you about the winter in Holland. because in the winter it’s cold here much birds go to hot countries. The birds don’t find food when it freezes and snows. My huisband and me go to Christmas-service in the church. the children come to us and have dinner with us. Do you celebrate Christmas? Is it very cold in the winter in your town? I find the juromailproject very interesting and educational. I with you a merry Christmas and a happy newyear! (Dinie) (my teacher helped me writing this letter) 2.5 Website as a platform Quite early on in the project, we decided that creating a website would be ideal as a good working platform. Obviously, e-mails can be exchanged without such a tool, but the website has proved extremely useful for a number of reasons:
The actual e-mails letters were sent to a joint webmail account, with passwords which enabled all participating teachers to follow the exchanges that were taking place. This ensured that no offensive messages were being sent, that the exchanges could be monitored and that exchanges that had stopped, all of a sudden, could be spotted straight away. Most important, however, is that a website is the visible proof of international ooperation taking place, a kind of visiting card for the schools that take part. Our website can be visited at the following address: www.juromail.com 2.6 Responses from teachers and students to the project When evaluating the project, teachers’ reactions varied widely, from mild irritation to great enthusiasm, but all agreed on the fact that they had gone through an important learning process. When evaluating the process, we designed at number of questionnaires; see chapter 7, Various work sheets. Students’ reactions were basically positive – most expressed the desire to follow up the e-mail exchange with a real exchange in person. Unfortunately, our European funding did not allow for students to be exchanged, but it is certainly a very worthwhile issue to work on.
I expect from this project to learn more about you and what is like
to live in Denmark. And to learn more about your culture. One of the good things about this project, that we have learned to understand the English language better. One other thing about is, we’ve met people abroad. So we could make new contacts with other pupils. Last but not least it was fun to do this project. Because at the same time we have to learn to write an English letter, we send it to other people. So we can communicate with a new pen pal.
Unfortunately we had some problems with writing a letter in English.
Danish teachers singing a morning song written by N.F.S. Grundtvig
4.1 To start with – teachers’ contact
Dear Katrin … I write this letter alone because Michel has got a headache. (Willem) When you work with groups, you will come across such opening lines quite frequently, but though you don’t like to see too many of such lines you know that the pen-pals will at least receive a letter and the project can continue. Nothing is more frustrating for students than writing a long letter and not getting a reply. So the first condition to make an email project a success is to make sure that the students’ letters are answered. I had only one problem; not everyone of my group was present when we neded to work on the project. (Sabina) Another advantage of working in groups, and with groups we mean groups of 2 or 3 students, is that the whole process of writing and sending the letters can be monitored and checked more easily by the teacher. Just learn something about the other culture. I communicated with an older man who wants to go to school again. At the beginning I didn’t like it at all but the way you work together on the project is nice. I learned a lot. (Julia) Working in groups, preferably pairs, makes it also possible for the teacher to pair students of different levels and, especially, of different age groups. Young students tend to object to having to write with (much) older students, but we found that they didn’t mind writing with a mixed age group. Actually, some students expressed surprise that they were having such an interesting exchange of letters with students ‘who are older than our parents’. From the outset, we considered this project as a peer teaching activity. Initially we thought of it as one student mailing to his or her peer abroad, but we quickly realised that we should turn it into a peer teaching activity, i.e. writing, typing, correcting and sending a letter, leading to another peer teaching activity, i.e. reading, discussing, answering and mailing a reply. Of course, most of this was conducted in the in the target language, English or German. 4.2 Introducing an e-mail project to your students
Make it clear to your students that this project can only be successful if they co-operate very well, not only with their pen-pals, but also with their fellow student(s). Matching students turned out to be one of the key issues. Matching students on level was already quite difficult, but proved possible. Matching by age was hardly achieved. We usually managed by pairing young/old with young/old or even young/young. No matter what you decide on, students need to be prepared very well for this. Going through the website is best done with a beamer. A beamer is also ideal when you explore some of the sites that are linked to the juromail.com website, such as for instance the Copenhagen or beautiful Cheb website. Very few students will do so if they haven’t been shown how to get there.
Well, a little bit about me.. .. .. .. well, where can I start?.. .. .. .. I am from Nigeria, I’ve been living in Denmark for about 7 years now, I like living in Denmark, very different from where am from, but am use to the people by now. I am also very pleased with my class, I’ve been lucky this time, I get along fine with everybody in class, but not everybody I can talk to, “you can always be friends with the world, you know” . Actually, I’ve got no job right now, I am also very much jobless as you are :-) I am a Christian, I love going to church, me being a Christian give me more understanding of things and of the world. (Mary) About the Carnival you talked about, there’s also the same carnival in Denmark, but the Danish called it ‘Festalavn’, but it’s mostly for kids, there are not that much fun activities in Denmark, because people are different over here…. (Mustafa-Mathilde) The education is a fulltime activity because of that you get a student grant which means you get money from the Danish state when you attend school. It is not much you get, but it’s enough to keep your everyday life going. (Espen)
Denmark is a part of Scandinavian and it consists of Denmark, Norway
and Sweden.
I can tell that u have written ur letter according to the "model
letter" Well.. sorry but I just found it a little boring( ah, I
mean, not ur letter) but the "model" so if it's ok I will write a
little about the Danish culture and landscapes next time, it really
isn't much of a tell. What I wanna hear about u..is what music u
like, more about ur spare time.. perhaps, whats ur favourite subject
and u know just fun things you've experienced.. And what about a
picture hey.. that could be fun, then I'll also work on one for u!
At one lesson we must have a look at a website that sells houses. The houses were in Holland and we had to show them to our email-palls. When we were done with that lesson we were interested in what kind of houses you have there in Copenhagen. So we started searching and we got to a site where you could buy really nice houses. We were overwhelmed because we always thought that you guys were very pour and have ugly houses. But it was nothing like that, they were really magnificent! (Tina-Niels) In the Netherlands we have some festivals too, like Pinkpop and Lowlands. There are many different rockbands. Famous and unknown. The music is in the open air. (Peter)
Is Negin a boy or a girl or maybe both. (Kurt) We can understand that we all think it’s a bad situation between Bush and Sadam. What are your opinion on this upcoming war? We believe it’s about time for Bush to take his medication (prozac) and join some anger management classes. (Hans) Just learn something about the other culture. I communicated with an older man who wants to go to school again. At the beginning I didn’t like it at all but the way you work together on the project is nice. I learned a lot. (Marie-Sophie) I thought my English was terrible but that of them was worse. But it wasn’t a problem. You could easily understand them. (Ahmed) But one email in the two weeks is not much, that must been one in the week. And you had a paier with a sory what you must say to the group in Copenhagen but I have write things that I will knows, also it´s not on the paper. The subjects were so boring. (Lizzi) Teambuilding in the school kitchen, Arnhem, September 2002
4.3 Instructions to your students – sending letters
Accuracy is the key term here and using a standard procedure helps teachers and the students and saves you from unnecessary trouble. Tell your students to write their letters in a word document. This has the advantage that they can use the spelling and the grammar facilities. When they have finished their letters, tell them to make a printed version and make sure that they have saved the letter on a disk. This has the advantage that the letter might be sent at another time than during the lesson if you are so unfortunate that the Internet connection is down during your lessons. Then they are ready to send their letters. Instruct them to send a copy to their pen pals and another one to you. In this way you can keep track of which groups that have finished their work. Whatever mail programme you use, it is very important that they write the correct e-mail address. If your class use the same e-mail address, make sure that the “subject” of their letters has a standard code so each group can recognise the letters they receive. They have to put their printed versions in their portfolios. In this way you also have a possibility to mark them, but only after they have been sent. The purpose of sending letters is not to send correct letters, but to communicate in a foreign language.
Mailing to communicate
If you wish to set up a project like this one, there are a number of considerations to make before you go ahead. Our first recommendation is that you start by getting management support at your school. This is essential for the following reasons;
We found that the meetings with you partner teacher we absolutely essential. This involves travel and accommodation costs for the teachers involved. Another possibility is to join our platform. The costs are an introduction fee of 250 euro, 50 euro for the maintenance of the website annually and 100 euro for each participating class. For further information contact the coordinator or the webmaster. See website www.juromail.com The staff hours involved are time off for the kick off conferences and then for the extra hours you will need when you start working with projects. Because working with IT in a new way takes more preparation than usual classroom teaching and very often more time after class. The extra hours after are often used solving problems that occurred in class, these may be technical problems with the IT facilities or they may be checking up on students’ work ensuring that the participating group at the other end of cyberspace has received a letter. An integrated part of the project is also to send photos of each other and this is also an extra task, which requires a digital camera and technical assistance. Last, you need to look at the IT facilities at you school and ensure that the IT coordinator can help you solve some of the many problems that inevitably will occur. Some of these problems can be avoided with careful planning, see Chapter 4 Practical advice; others might involve the IT coordinator. But often the problems are trivial because your students are not also as clever with the computer as they think themselves!
Teachers at work
Language: English Level: beginners/intermediate Number of assignments: 4 for each group in 8 weeks Time: spring 2003 Level: absolute beginners (1) and beginners (2) Date: Spring 2003 Teachers exchange lists of students’ names
Language: English Level: intermediate
Time: weeks 5 – 12, 2003 Denmark the odd weeks (5, 7, 9, 11) Holland the even weeks (6, 8, 10, 12)
Number of assignments: A total of 4 letters per group. 3 informal for your pen pal and 1 formal for the teacher. Some of them will be marked
Length of the letters: At least 200 words, no maximum Number of participants: 70 Teachers: Fons Jansen; Rijn Ijssel College Bodil Brier; Vallenbæk HF Ellen Jensen; VUC Vest Klazien Wierbos-v.d. Brink; Deltion College Dear students, We have designed this project for our classes and are looking forward to trying it out with you. As you know the idea is inter-cultural collaboration, and what we have done is setting up a frame for you to work in. We have called our project “Exchanges in cyberspace”, and we hope that you will have many exchanges of ideas, opinions and information, so that by the end of the project you will have learned more about each other, more about each other’s country and more about each other’s ideas. If you wish to exchange more ideas outside class, you may use your private e-mail addresses. When you write your letters you must follow guidelines for letter writing such as e.g. layout, language and punctuation. Your teacher will provide you with more details. As mentioned before, we built the frame, but filling it in is your job and the success of this project depends on you and your active participation. We hope that you have fun with your tasks. The project is designed as a number of letter exchanges. Each letter has one main topic, but there will also be room for personal exchanges on whatever topic you may find interesting. We want the letters in this project to follow a standard structure that includes five paragraphs. Paragraph 5 finish with at least 2 questions to your partner (open wh-words) Apart from writing e-mails you must also contribute to the web-site, the idea is that YOU fill the students’ page with material YOU think is of interest to the project and to your fellow students. E.g. interesting links to web-sites, stories about yourself, photos, addresses, ideas, exercises, games, fun. Please send this material to the webmaster and he will put it onto the web-site on the students’ page.
Kind regards from your teachers.
6.3 Austausch im raum Language: German Level: beginners/intermediate
E-mail Projekt in deutscher Sprache VUC Vest (Kopenhagen) – Deltion (Zwolle)
Liebe Kursteilnehmer und Kursteilnehmerinnen, Unser neues E-mail besteht diesmal aus 3 Mails,in denen ihr zu bestimmten Fragestellungen den Schuelern aus Kopenhagen oder Zwolle etwas ueber euer Land erzaehlen sollt. Ausserdem waere es wuenschenswert,wenn ihr auch euere persoenliche Meinung dazu formulieren koenntet. Viel Spass beim Schreiben!
6.4. Himmelsturm in Cyberspace Language: German Level: beginners
E-MAIL PROJECT VUC VEST (KOPENHAGEN) – DELTION COLLEGE (ZWOLLE)
Details: Dienstag 11/3: Kopenhagen macht Aufgabe 1 + Mail 1 (Photo und Hinweise) Mittwoch 12/3: Zwolle macht: Aufg. 1 + Mail 1 ____________
Montag 17/3: Kopenhagen Aufg. 2+3 + Mail 2 Mittwoch 19/3: Zwolle: Aufg. 2+3 + Mail 2 ____________
Dienstag 25/3: Kopenhagen: Aufg. 4+5 + Mail 3 Mittwoch 26/3: Zwolle: Aufg. 4+5 + Mail 3 ____________
Montag 31/3: Kopenhagen: Aufg. 6+7+8 + Mail 4 Mittwoch 2/4: Zwolle: Aufg. 6+7+8 + Mail 4 ____________
Dientag 8/4: Kopenhagen Aufg. 9 + Mail 5 Mittwoch 9/4: Zwolle: Aufg. 9 + Mail 5
Before class
7.1 Matching groups according to different criteria
Teachers’ planning in Arnhem, September 2002
7.2 Teachers’ assessment sheet at the end of a full e-mail exchange
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Term
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Letters received |
On time |
Content useful |
Match of levels |
Match of life style |
Teacher Communication |
IT skills students |
IT conditions |
Other remarks |
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You can indicate your assessment by using the following symbol:
++ very good + good + - acceptable - fair - - unacceptable
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Klazien – Julie: Linking Language |
Matching students In one class young/old |
Continued/close contact between teachers- agree procedure with the other |
Photographs at early stage assignments 1 |
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Zdenek - Ina |
A bunch of letters got lost (letter 3) Remember copies on diskettes/c-drive |
Continuing 1 or 2 letters more |
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Anita - Bente |
Too many students on a computer Group size ideal 2/3 |
Important to keep schedule – Look at the timetable and agree who starts |
Students working in class must speak the foreign language to practice oral proficiency |
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Ellen - Fons |
Teacher’s emergency service (write letters on behalf the students) |
Teachers reply to the last assignment in Exchanges |
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Dinie - Eva |
Teacher decided group composition |
Thorough introduction to students is essential e.g. articles, mind map, web-site, students homework |
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General: |
Teachers should be prepared for integrating it/English |
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Flemming – Antje |
Standard head: Brief 1 an Gruppe 1 to “name” Letter 1 to group 1 Peter... |
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Another aspect in the project is the use of IT. We are still a group of teachers who are not completely confident with the use of IT. We have not received proper training - we train ourselves as we go along.
In addition to this, it may be one thing to be an IT-user but yet another thing to do troubleshooting and finally teach our students to use IT.
Arnhem September 2002
7.5 SWOT-analysis on the project juromail.com
Strengths- personal contact between teachers - photograph on the website - improves students’ it-skill - introduce the use of IT in a natural way - email quick and easy - learning to write letters/e-mailing - student co-operation within their class (Zwolle) - good matching of levels - promotion of your school - students exchange e-mail addresses to continue the communication
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Weaknesses- differences in number of students in the two classes - differences in life style (age, attitude, etc.) - dependence of IT-facilities (opening & sending letters) - extra strain on the teachers - students non-attendance * - use of the website - project very dependent on the key people - difficult to include more colleagues - how to get and maintain motivation and commitment - 3 letters – too few! - Time of the school year |
Opportunities- use the connections to students’ exchange/visit - Use of photographs - Correcting letters - Sending holiday postcard/Christmas card |
Threats- No money for next year |
Midway analysis May 2002
Teaches’ planning
7.6 Solutions to the weaknesses in the SWOT-analysis
Weaknesses |
Solutions |
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- differences in number of students in the two classes |
- matching similar class sizes - divide groups in two/tree students |
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- differences in life style (age, attitude, etc.) |
- more focus in interest in each other lives/countries/general interests/areas - more preparation before you write letters: Use the website, find another material, ad more links etc.. Create a genuine interest - tell about yourself – with mutual respect |
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- dependence of IT-facilities (opening & sending letters) |
- point out these problems to the management |
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- extra strain on the teachers |
- a part of the ordinary teaching or curriculum; there you should get mere hours |
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- students non-attendance * |
- mainly a problem in the spring |
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- use of the website |
- (said before..) - item on the agenda in the September meeting |
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- project very dependent on the key people |
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- difficult to include more colleagues |
- September discuss how to include new & more colleague |
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- how to get and maintain motivation and commitment |
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- 3 letters – too few! |
- 3! + one to the other teacher - 2½ months |
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- Time of the school year |
- October-December |
Teachers in Copenhagen, spring 2003