Europeana platform, Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage

Today I am writing to let you know about a very powerful platform called Europeana. 

Europeana is Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage. It provides free, online access to over 50 million digital records coming from over 3,700 libraries, museums, archives and galleries across Europe. Europeana features art from over 3,000 institutions across Europe, from the likes of Rijksmuseum, the British Library and the Louvre, as well as local museums from every corner of the European Union. Highlights include Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Undoubtedly, a very helpful source for those teachers implementing Art both at Primary and Secondary levels. Click here to see the Art-Europeana collection.

Europeana offers a Music collection which includes recordings, pieces of sheet music and other music items from across Europe so Music teachers will benefit from this platform too.

Teachers who wish to introduce Natural History content in their Science classes 

will have the opportunity to explore the natural world in 3,415,528 drawings, specimens, images and documents in the Natural History collection.

211,249 items on the topic of migration to, from and within Europe are thoroughly depicted in the Migration Collection. 

I am sure this platform founded by the European Commisssion in 2008 and updated with new features including a translation tool into 27 languages will enable you  to enrich your classes.

Inquiry-Based Learning: Developing Student-Driven Questions in CLIL classrooms

Last August I read that Wildwood IB World Magnet School uses the inquiry-based model to put students in charge of their learning. This model is based on lessons that stem from student questions and harness the power of curiosity so   I asked myself: why don't we try doing the same in our CLIL contexts? Why not in every content area? 

When you watch the video above, I am sure you will agree that the model has to be effective if  a teacher utters a sentence as powerful as the following one:  

"All of a sudden,  we see our students doing things that really matter to them and they're excited and they're passionate and they want to talk about what they're learning".

How can we create a culture of enquiry? First of all, we need to create the atmosphere that allows students  to ask comfortably. If students don’t feel welcome in the classroom, they won't ask questions or engage in the learning. This is a great step in the right direction but it may not be enough because many students need support in asking questions and creating different kinds of questions for different situations. In order to fulfill this goal, teachers should use a variety of strategies, such as structured protocols and question starters to support students in asking effective questions.

At this point I would like to recommend a great book  by  Wiggins and McTighe:" Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding". You can read a very interesting extract from the book here which includes essential questions organized by areas.

You can also facilitate your students' inquiry-based learning through some ready-to-use  tools for the classroom. I reckon you will like this tool provided by www.edutopia.org. (It  also includes a task on note-taking and another one on vocabulary).

On October 13th we will meet for our  first seminar session and I will try and spend some time on  this engaging issue of "inquiry-based learning" and its usefulness in our CLIL classrooms. 

FACTWorld and CLIL

The Bulgarian English Teachers' Association  held a Conference in Sofia on June 6th 2015 and Keith Kelly developed a  very clarifying workshop on 'CLIL for ELTs'. 

Throughout our seminar sessions we have been talking about the need to provide students who are learning an area through English with the language support  which will enable them to understand the content as well as to write about it or prepare an oral presentation on it.  You will find a very  clear example of how to support students with the required language on Heredity. 

As you run through the slides, you will also witness how groups of students carry out project based learning  in Science classes.  There are different examples for young learners but I like one that  shows a a group of very young learners working on "Let's launch a rocket together" and we can see how they have a great time while  they learn content related to rocket design  and use the language they need  (nouns, action verbs and the language of comparison).

The slides also include very interesting  "product" projects, one of which I highly recommend for Chemistry teachers: Chemistry as a Cultural Enterprise. Here you will be able to take part in School partnership projects and/or see the projects that have already been completed.  I also reckon that  Chemistry teachers  are bound to find the  "Publications" and "News" sections really interesting.

One of the last slides includes some essential references for those  teachers who implement different areas at Primary and Secondary levels  through English , such as the Forum for across the Curriculum Teaching and the  Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council  website.  The section called "News, events and publications" will  open a door to   a great deal of news that can add an element of motivation to your classes.  There are clearly written texts and in some cases  there is a video and even the video transcript itself.  If you enter here, you will find a nice example: "How do we choose the food we eat?" 

Therefore,  I would like to thank Keith Kelly  for sharing this  workshop with all of us.  You can follow it  below these lines:

International Women's Day 2015

20 years have passed since 17,000 participants and 30,000 activists streamed into Beijing for the opening of the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995.They were remarkably diverse, coming from around the globe, but they had a single purpose in mind: gender equality and the empowerment of all women, everywhere. By the time the conference closed, it had produced the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most progressive blueprint ever for advancing women’s rights. As a defining framework for change, the Platform for Action made comprehensive commitments under 12 critical areas of concern. Even 20 years later, it remains a powerful source of guidance and inspiration.

The following video can be an excellent introduction to a series of sessions to celebrate International Women's Day 2015:

After viewing this video, you can proceed with a text on International Women's Day and some activities on it. Choose the ones that best fit your school context  from the lesson plan you can get here.

If you have the chance to spend some sessions on the topic, this is a nice webquest on "Important women in the world". It is aimed at making students aware of the important work different women belonging to different work areas have carried out. You can adapt it and include other women if you think other choices may be more successful with your students. 

For those of you who share my passion for music as a means to create the proper atmosphere and convey powerful messages,  I have two proposals: the first one is Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive". Even though it was released in 1978, it has remained a true pop music anthem that highlights women's strength. You can download the lyrics here  and this is a worksheet you can use with your students.

My  second proposal is "A woman's worth". This was Alicia Key's second single. In this song, she wrote about self-esteem, and being worthy of the kindness of others. Keys feels it can relate to a man or a woman  so I reckon it is  very suitable for our students  because they can  listen to a song that describes what good relations should be like.

The video was shot in Brooklyn, near where she grew up:

The lyrics of the song offer a great opportunity to convey the powerful message of relations based on respect and equality. Precisely because the message is so powerful, I decided to forget about grammar objectives such as the first conditional or modal verbs and to offer students some activities which would enable them to fully understand the meaning of words and sentences in the song. That's why I developed  this worksheet. 

I hope that the proposals above will contribute to step up our efforts to foster gender equality in our classes  

THE EUROPEAN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH GAME FOR SCHOOLS

                                       

Today I am writing to invite you to take part in an on-line Research Game that will allow  you tyo test your students' skills in the field of Research and Biodiversity and  participate in the European final on-line competition  and interact with students from abroad. 

Challenge your students' in their understanding of Scientific Research and Biodiversity with the European Scientific Research Game, an online game for students from the age of 10 years.

The game has two phases and schools can decide to participate in one of both phases:

-  Phase 1. Carry out a research project' - students will complete a scientific research in their schools and report online - open until the April 5 2014.

-   Phase 2. An online competition - the final step of the project, teams

challenge each other to be the best in playing an online video game. April 29th 2014.

You can see much more about the game here

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

The Research Game project has been funded with support from the European Commission. It  will motivate secondary school students by replicating the excitement of scientific research. The Project has created an Internet-based game to develop an understanding of research work and to teach best practices.

In the game students will collaborate internationally across Europe, to build hypotheses, research and test the validity of their hypothesis and finalise a theory based on their findings. Students will be expected to share their research findings with other groups.

Your students will learn in a fun and engaging way the logical thinking and deductive reasoning typical of the Scientific Method, core skills not only required for science, but in all their futures.

If you need more information please write to:

researchgameproject@unisalento.it

Project website