eTwinning

After coming down from the heady heights of finishing the last of her coursework for her masters, Amanda had a hard week.  In addition to the additional classes that the new timetable has given her, she had to take all of my classes on Monday and Tuesday as I was sick.  This left Dave and I at home watching movies and Amanda  going out into the cold to provide for us.  Other than the fact that I felt pretty damn ratty, it could have actually been quite a good situation.  I could have gotten used to that.  Unfortunately, surely enough, I felt better today and had to go to work.

During my first period today, the Grade 3 and 4s had a Skype conference with some students from Finland.  This is all part of a program that our colleague, Ili, has been involved with called eTwinning (as in electronically making two or more schools twins).  In our case, we are now twinned with a school in Finland and a school in France.  Ili and the students have been hard at work creating posters about their environment, the town and their lives so they can be sent to the twin schools.  It is very exciting for the kids and a lot of them are really getting into it.  This was especially true today as they were going to actually get to talk to the kids that they'd previously been writing to.

It was quite good.  One kid from each country went up to the camera, asked some prearranged questions, then when the answers were given the rest of the class tried to take notes.  As our kids were a bit more advanced, they did most of the talking.  It was actually a little funny. When Roosa, one of the Finnish girls, came up  to talk she gave the typical one or two word answers but (un)fortunately she was paired with Kitti, one on the more chatty girl in our class.  When Roosa said her name, Kitti quickly gushed "Oh, what a beautiful name", "Do you have brothers or sisters?" "What are their names?" "Do you have pets?".  Kitti then started wonderfully chatting about her siblings and her pets leaving poor Roosa a little left behind.

Still, it was an awesome experience for all the kids as it was an opportunity to have a real conversation with different people.  We are having another Skype call tomorrow, this time with the twin school from France.

- Daniel.