etwinning 2015: final presentation of Polish and German students

Today we had the last meeting with students and teachers from Poland and a single teacher from the Sultanate of Oman. The etwinning project member Joanna Biniek and her class from Zurawica/Poland presented about their local city in the southeast of Poland next to the Ukrainian border. They introduced their city, their geography, talked about their local soccer club and about famous locations next to the city.

The Germans  introduced the islands Fehmarn and Baltrum again.

Beatrix Henkel, a secondary teacher from the Sultanate of Oman, took her chance to get a view into this powerful tool of videoconferencing to support teaching, she wants to use for her students in the near future.

Because of the lack of time we quitted the prepared Kahoot games today.


Thank you very much to our Polish partner and to Mrs Henkel.

etwinning 2015: Beautiful Places on My Island, English presentation, Part 2, 3 & 4

When you think about beautiful islands you maybe dream about sunny days and beautiful beaches. However, who really think about beautiful places on these sensitive island areas far from the coastline and how peoples on these islands live every day?

On 11th May and on 12th May in the morning we met a lot of students and teachers who presented about their local islands and some beautiful places on it. And we shared some information about how people on these islands get access to drinking water while they are surrounded by slatwater at all.

All members of this project now know that there are a lot of beautiful places in the world we should protect. And we all get to know how people live at these places to protect  their close environment.
Next to these conclusions we shared a lot of cultural traditions and information about the countries.

These were the final presentations of this etwinning project. The project founder, Liina Truu from Estonia, participated to these meetings with her students as well as etwining project participant Yvonne Dalqvist from Sweden. Another class from Taiwan with their teacher Lin- Lin Tan told us all about the beautiful places on their island in the Pacific Ocean. And students from Ipoh, Malaysia, gave us an overviews about beautiful and traditional places in this Southeast Asian country.

After the presentations from Germany and Sweden all participants enjoyed the Kahoot quizzes they prepared for their partners.

Founded by Liina Truu from the beautiful island Saaremaa in Estonia and me the project idea was spreaded around using the HLW- Skypers teachers` community and Google Plus to reach more than 250 teachers and classes around the world.

At a Google sheet the teachers who wanted to participate had to register to certain time slots I set up in advance.

To prepare all these meetings the teachers had to meet in advance for several times to discuss technical features concerning the videoconferencing system far from the regular time table while the students prepared their presentations throughout their regular English and Chemistry lessons and in the afternoon at home.

Not everything worked well from the very first beginning. Sometimes we had some trouble to work with the technology.








I prepared some videos of these meetings which you can watch here. The first one is already published.

Some of the registered participants didn't prepare their presentations right in time. To honour their strong effords to prepare their presentations, too, we will do another presentation on 22nd June to get to know more beautiful places on or near beautiful island.

etwinning 2015: Beautiful Places On My Island, English Presentation, Part 1

On Wednesday, 29th April, between 1.30 pm and 3.00 pm Central German Summer Time, we had our first English meeting. I took part with that class who did their German presentation on Monday that week.
Meanwhile the students translated their German versions into English and were eager to start their presentations for their partners from abroad.











The meeting was scheduled with etwinning member Cliona Brennock and her class at St. Molaga's SNS, Balbriggan, Co. Dublin, Ireland.

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They reported about beautiful places on a near Irish island which are of high historical interest concerning Irish traditions.











This meeting was dated outside the regular German time table because we had the chance to reach classes from the American continent. So we all were very happy to meet teachers and students from North- America and South- America. We welcomed the American teachers Joe McNulty from Newtown Middle School, Newtown, Pennsylvania, 

and Cheryl Kemper from the Forest Hills School from Cincinnati, Ohio,

as well as Renata Madureira and her seventh grade class from the International Escola de Idiomas, Brasilia, Brazil.

Despite of the regular German presentations from Monday my students started with another presentation about Germany, German geography and hydrology. After this short presentation the first Kahoot game was done.

Next to it the German and Irish students presented their beautiful places, in turns.
For example, this Irish student reported about Newgrange, the prehistoric monument in County Meath which was built 3200 BC.

and a German students' group reported about the island Langeoog, some beautiful places on it and how people get their drinking water.

The American teachers added some pictures from their beautiful places at the American east coast like this one in New Jersey.

We had to close down at 3 pm already, but knowing that there are many many more beautiful places in the participants' countries we could share and talk about.





The next etwinning videoconference will be on 11th May 2015. Until that day the German students will improve their presentations, eager to start again at a new meeting with other classes from Malaysia and La Reunion.

etwinning 2015: Beautiful Places On My Island, German Presentation, Part Two

On 28th April 2015, between 08.15 am and 09.30 am German Central Summer Time, the second 7th graders' class named 7B has its first meeting in German with Yvonne Dalqvist, etwinning project member from Sweden.

Students presenting beautiful places and
fact of the drinking water supply on different German islands.

Yvonne is teaching German at her school named Alneskolan in Örnsköldsvik. That is in the northeast of Sweden at the Baltic Sea.  She was available with two young ladies to attend the presentations. Cause she still has some trouble with the technique the students from Sweden will present their beautiful places from the Swedish Baltic Sea island during an English meeting in May.
The Germans presented their Frisian and Baltic island in alphabetical order.

Students used their smartphones to vote for the correct answer.

We played a prepared Kahoot game with questions from the presentation. We had a lot of fun during the meeting. The students were really excited during the Kahoot voting.

On Wednesday, 29th April 2015, the students will have their first English meeting with more than one partner.

etwinning 2015: Beautiful Places On My Island, German Presentation, Part One

"Beautiful places on an island", that is what we keep in mind when we dream about a relaxed and funny vacation. Today my chemistry class 7c presented some German islands in the North Sea and in the Baltic Sea with locations they had declared as a beautiful place from their point of view. And they added some pictures and information about how people on these German islands get their tap water from.
Today their guests were Mikhail Bukhtoyarov and Anna Bukhtoyarova from Siberia, Russia. They loved their presentations and their creativity to prepare each single slide.

The students became ambassadors of their country representing Germany to an international audience. The Kahoot Quizz at the end of the whole presentation awoke interest during the whole event.

This was the first of about six presentations the students from grade 7 will do throughout the next few weeks at different days and different times in German and English. The whole project is accepted by the European Commission as an etwinning project. Look at the following presentation to get a view what happened this morning in the chemistry room:

Thank you very much Mr. and Mrs Bukhtoyarov from Russia.

The other class, grade 7, will do their German presentations tomorrow at 06.15 am GMT:

https://plus.google.com/events/cnk92inscu7ahknq9ghmj3lum6g?authkey=COngwprZhMSn8gE

"School of Future"

Our school named "Realschule Sundern" in Germany was certified and honoured by members of the State's Ministry last Friday, 20th March 2015, for the third successive time. The school is now allowed to call itself "School of Future" again.

"School of Future" ambassadors from our school.

During a ceremony at a school in Marsberg, Germany, Pia, Noelle, Almedina, Leonie and Sophie as well as Marie and me as their teacher went to the stage to receive the certificates, door plates for the school and a flag from the President of the State's Ministry of Environmental Affairs, Mr. Thomas Delschen, from Ferdi Lenze, vize county commissioner and from Martina Nolte, schools inspector of the county.

Walking on the stage, they received the certificate
and all the other pleasant things

The honoured schools themselves prepared this ceremony with music and dancing performances. That morning 26 schools and 25 partner institutes in our county were honoured for their educational work. Mentioning the main idea "learning within networks" the jury certified those schools and partners which had taken strong effords to realize this main idea at their school and institutes between 2012 and 2015 successfully. Years ago already there was set up a network in our county named "commonly active in the HSK" (HSK: the abbreviation of our county: Hochsauerlandkreis). This network had been build up out of schools and extracurricular education providers. They have offered certain services for schools to educate the students outside the regular classes at school.

These 6 ladies were representing lots of students at our school,
working and learning within networks.

Education for global sustainable development  at different aspects will be successful only, if the youth today (who will be the adults from tomorrow!) will be educated with additional experts, learning in networks. To discuss global problems and to search for common solutions of these and to motivate teachers, students and whole classes for sustainable development successfully. This was our task to express with our contribution to be honoured finally.

Originally created by our students' radio station "Radio Rasant" where students from different countries are collaborating to prepare common radio transmissions, this idea has been spread around at our school meanwhile and has already reached several classes and subjects at different levels.

from the right: Stefanie Horn, Dr. Thomas Delschen,
Martina Nolte, Ferdi Lenze, Reinhard Marx

That is the reason why we could present the "Radio Rasant" project last Friday as well as the "Lunchboxproject" as a second example we did last year already (some of you might remember about that!) for the second time.  Students from Nepal, Australia, India, the USA, Indonesia, Taiwan, Brazil, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Russia and students from grade 7 at our school took pictures from their lunchboxes, presented them by videoconferencing to their partners and discussed aspects of nutrition and food shortage.

They took their chance to record some interviews.

All schools got the chance to present their projects at a little exhibition straight before the ceremony started. Interested teachers from everywhere in our county and members of the extracurricular providers were walking around and got a lot of information about collaboration at our school, mentioning HLW- Skypers and other networks we use to get in touch with other classes and teachers from abroad. Finally we also mentioned this excellent opportunities to implement English language into another subject.



The state's campagne to strengthen sustainable development education at schools will go on. And we will go on teaching using learning networks with teachers, students and experts from abroad. More than 400 teachers and experts are connected to our school meanwhile. Thank you very much to all of you who have supported us doing this extraordinary kind of learning.

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This year our school is celebrating its 90th birthday. A lot of events are planed to celebrate this anniversary and to light a beacon of quality education. To reach this aim permanently you have to keep abreast of new ways of education you usually become aware of, but also by passing in review about what you have done the years before.

This time ( we usually celebrate our anniversaries every 5 years!) we had a new idea celebrating our anniversary. Inviting former students to our school  teaching our students today about former kind of school life about 25 years ago we wanted to remind our guests about what they had experienced during their stay at our school. And they gave our students today the opportunity to compare and esteem actual education processes. Some aspects of modern history were mentioned as far as they had influenced school life those days.

A team of teachers were set up to do all the preparations including the search for former students. Looking for certain adults we got the information about 2 former students who live outside Germany and outside Europe today. One is living in the USA and another one in New Zealand. It is curious to mention that these both ladies are from the same final year in 1990 and they were both attending the same classes. Leaving Germany years ago they lost sight of each other for about 25 years now.

Until last week, when they met again with some teachers from our school, their former teachers and the schools' pricipal, the vize principal and me, in a Google Hangout videoconference in my classroom late in the evening. Because there is a small time slot only to cover all time differences without trouble.
There was a lot to talk about. And all together they remind each other about what was going on in the late 80s of the last century. And we presented some actual slides from their 'old school' how it looks like today.

But sometimes all teachers were quiet and listened to what these two ladies from abroad had to talk about to each other, 25 years after their last contact. The whole session took about 1 hour time before all participants went their seperate ways again: in the USA, in New Zealand and in Germany were we left for home finally.