Italian delegation from our partner city Calopezzati (Calabria) attended my maths lesson

It was an unusual event on 12th September 2014: a delegation of eight members of the Italian city named Calopezzati visited our city Sundern in Germany. Calopezzati is a small town at the seaside in the northeast of Calabria. They were invited by our local municipality to join our great feast in the city. The delegation visited a lot of sights which are related to the youth in our city. In Sundern there live people from 64 different nations. The number of people who originally come from Italy is the highest. More than 3000 people (from about 28000 inhabitants) have Italian roots, most of them from Calabria, which is in the very south of Italy. The Italian guests got the opportunity to visit a German secondary school and to attend a lesson live.

This year it was my school - and this year it was one of my classes- and this year it was me!

Joined by members of our local municipality from Sundern, my principal, my vice- principal and the vice- principal of our neighbour school the delegation attended my maths lesson in class 7b sitting in the back of the classroom. They were interested in how to use a SMART- board in different ways.

I started with a PPT as a picture quizz to find out the name of that beautiful city shown on the board. Checking the correct answers of their homework the students were able to connect the correct result to each excercise. The name of the city  they saw on the board was Calopezzati, the name of the city where the delegation was from.

Later I demonstrated a maths videoconference with Steve Sherman from Cape Town, South Africa, introducing the International Maths Olympics 2014 to the students and the guests. Inviting the guests into some maths problems all attendees (adults and students!) were involved into this excercises. The number of "students" rised from 28 up to 40! The guests got a view into far distance learning and got to know only one web tool that can be used for this kind of learning.

Using the internet web tool "Kahoot" the attendees were able to make suggestions about the correct answer.

While the guests used their smartphones to answer the students used the board to point out their decisions.And finally they got a feedback about the number of points they got for a correct answer.

The guests and the students liked it and the guests honoured our common work mentioning the fruitful collaboration of the whole group.

Thank you very much, Steve Sherman!!!