Tuesday 21 December 2010

Merry Christmas


Dear friends

We would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us in Spain. We hope you enjoy these days with all your family and friends. May peace break into your homes and all your wishes come true in the coming year.

With lots of love

Monday 20 December 2010

Social Networks in Portugal

Hello everyone,

It hasn't been a busy week here at IPL as most students and teachers are preparing their Christmas holidays. But our “Akademicos”, which is our school newspaper and which is totally created by students, had a thematic issue concerning social networks. Some of its focus has been given to their use by Erasmus students, to “connect” to their country land friends. Also, me and Antonia have been asked to write its editorial.
On reflecting on this task, we thought on IEOL and the use we give to such tools. We transcribe here some parts of the article we wrote. It’s also some “food for thought” for our group and project.
Have a nice Christmas everyone!!!
- Filipe & Antónia


Some years ago the Internet has seen the rise of a set of services that made its users “producers” of information rather than mere “consumers”. The blog and the wiki have been the “icon” of this revolution (coined Web 2.0) and users used them to produce personal information such as their global opinions on world issues.
Today a new type of service, social networks, is the icon of this revolution. But instead of using these tools to “produce information”, users are using them to “produce relationships”. We use them to share feelings, states of mind, emotions. We use them to create relations. This is the way the technological platforms for these services are oriented: we click an “I like” button and a relationship becomes stronger.
This is an extraordinary technology which will certainly evolute in the future. What can be the face of such evolution? We personally believe that these technologies will blend and participate in other human activities, such as collaborative work and collaborative learning. We already see some of these platforms, such as Facebook, to allow events scheduling and “group” management, but new tools will rise (although for now, we can argue, it is just the “communication platform” that is set, which is not a small feature!). But in the future we will certainly see “tools for learning” in these platforms. A kind of “I like” button to build learning relations.
A tremendous future. Let’s hope that its implementation is near.

Thursday 16 December 2010

STUDENTS OPINIONS ABOUT THE MEETING IN LEIRIA (PORTUGAL)

Our experience has been unforgettable, We visited some cities that were worth visiting. The time we spent together with the Spanish and foreing students who took part in the meeting and with the teachers themselves was very good.The Portuguesse people were very friendly, they told us legends and stories about their country and we did the same. They have been very exciting days. We felt young again like when we were in school and University. Now, we have a certificate that says we have been part of an European project, not everybody has one!The only problem with the trip was the time, we wish that we could have stayed a bit longer.

Friday 10 December 2010

Finnish Christmas Traditions

Here is one of our students, Tuula, explaining about traditional Christmas food in Finland. Sorry about the poor quality of the video (I am NOT a professional photographer, although I pretended to be one...)

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM FINLAND!!!

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Let's get social in Finland

Our English group has started its Christmas holiday, which means that we don´t have any contact lessons before January, but we keep in touch by email and the students will be working on a mutual assignment on the group blog. Have you watched our Christmas party video yet? We invited a few students from the group "Finnish for foreigners" to join us over a cup of mulled wine and Finnish Christmas goodies.

The experiences from our trip to Portugal inspired us and our students so much that we are nine people going to Italy in February, six students and three teachers. We are also looking forward to getting in contact with students in our partner organizations and, of course, looking forward to meeting some of them in Italy, too.

For now, we would like to wish you a very merry Christmas.

Saturday 27 November 2010

Results of the meeting of Leiria (20th November 2010)

The attainment of the objectives of the learning Partnership is made nearer. Particularly we have appreciated in the report of the Finnish group the combined use of google docs with wordpress.
Concerning the constructivist approach presented by the Portuguese we’d like to underline the following aspect: to evaluate what and how an adult learns through the decoding of cognitive maps employed by the examined representative sample.
Particularly the tool employed to discover the cognitive maps has aroused a lot of interest. According to us, in a future project, an experimentation could already be initialized directed to fight the racism and the xenophobia in the adult world that is a priority of LLP underlined in these last years.
Through the care of the language we can change and get clean our concepts, too.
The Spanish and Polish groups finally have showed that through the blog and a good structuring of the adult learners’ groups it is possible to get shortly time good results.

By Italian group

Friday 26 November 2010

IMPRESSIONS OF THE MEETING IN LEIRIA

We, all the teachers, have got together to evaluate how the meeting in Leiria went, and all of us have reached the same conclusion: that it has been a very good one. These are the reasons for this evaluation:

The working atmosphere has been the appropriate one to be able to reach the objectives we all had in mind: Johanna, with her smiling face, has directed the working sessions very well and we have tackled the objectives and prepared efficiently each one's tasks in anticipation for the next meeting in Italy.

We have to point out the good job the hosts have done towards us. They fulfilled the needs we had and they tried to follow through the timetables, didn't you, Pedro?

As we visited some of the IPL's schools, we were able to visit different places and this has been a very good experience. As far as the attention paid to our students by the IPL members, our impression is that they have done an outstanding job and for this reason, our students have an excellent impression of the meeting, specially living together with the Portuguese people. Apart from this, they have had the opportunity to visit some cities: Lisbon, Bathalla, Leiria and due to this they have got more cultural information and learnt different cultures.

The students are also working on this topic and once they have finished it, we will post it to the blog. Apart from this, the new technologies students, some of them took part in the meeting in Leiria, are preparing another work with some photographs of the meeting , and we will show you soon.

Thursday 25 November 2010

Results of the meeting (Leiria 20th -24th October 2010)


Comments

During the meeting the coordinator suggested concrete activities, useful suggestions to carry out the project and to achieve the project objectives; each planned topic has been debated. The future activities and the respective objectives have been clear and feasible and all the partners will carry out the agreed activities.

It was interesting the reflection about the “constructivism”, as a good educational method to help the students to build their knowledge. In our opinion the constructivism teaching methodology is effective in the field of adults teaching and, at the same time, a winning approach for the on line learning.

One of the most important aspects of the meeting was the participation of the Spanish and Finnish learners. They had the great occasion to visit a modern institute, to discover a nice country and to meet people from different countries, to have the opportunity to practice their English.

During the meeting, we have learnt important information about Wikispaces thanks to Philipe.

Our main objectives for the next part of the project

We believe that for increasing the on line communication we should

  • assist our students to improve their English knowledge;
  • look for all the activities which are useful to stimulate our students to familiarize with tools of social media in order to interact on line with learners from the countries of the partnership.

This way we will give them the possibility to exchange actively information and experiences with the adult learners from other countries.

By Italian group

Monday 22 November 2010

News IEOL meeting in Leiria. Published in the cienciapt.pt. Link
This is a site about science in Portugal. Use the Google tool to translate pages.

Monday 15 November 2010

IEOL - Photos from Leiria Meeting

Hello everyone! Here are some photographs from the meeting in Leiria.
A hug for everyone, see you soon!! PHOTOS

Saturday 13 November 2010

Portuguese team homework

Dear partners,

We have come to an original way of presenting our homework by using some cool functionalities of YouTube videos. Did you know that YouTube videos can be interactive? That is, a video can be defined to have "clicable" areas on its screen that link the video's visitor to other videos?
We have done a small experiment and propose you a game: how well do you know Portugal?
Please go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NdT1ivdREg, see the video and play, by interacting with it!

Friday 12 November 2010

Video from our Christmas Party

Check out this video from the "Let's Get Social" Christmas Party!

Pictures from Christmas Party

Here are some pictures from an early Christmas party that the "Let's Get Social" group arranged in Valkeakoski. We invited some international guests from a Finnish for Foreigners course to join us and talk about Christmas traditions around the world.

Let's Get Social Christmas Party

Minutes of Meeting 3

Here is a link to the minutes from the meeting in Leiria, Portugal, in October 2010.

Minutes of Meeting 3

Thursday 11 November 2010

Presentation of Finnish partners in Leiria

This is the presentation of the Finnish partners in Leiria:

IEOL meeting 3 presentation Portugal

This is the presentation of the Portuguese partner in Portugal

Minutes of meeting 2, Lublin

Here is a link to the minutes of the second meeting of IEOL in Lublin, March 2010.

Minutes of meeting in Lublin

Presentation of Spanish partners in Portugal

Progress report by the Spanish Partner:

Saturday 30 October 2010

Project plan 3

This is the project plan for the next project period. Please note the schedules!

Friday 29 October 2010

IEOL Leiria 21 - 22 October 2010

Here are some photos from our meeting in Portugal. Please post some of your own photos as well!

Real collaboration

When starting this project, we hoped that it would help create some real-life interaction between students in various countries. For us, it is important that our students can practice their English and communication skills in real contexts with real people.

Now, we believe that this will be achieved on two levels. Firstly, the students who came to Portugal with us got to practice their speaking skills with the Portuguese and Spanish students. They were "thrown in at the deep end" and had to manage by themselves, without one of us teachers by their sides at all times. This way, they got a positive experience that they could manage with the language skills they have. It is important for them to realize that you don't have to be perfect in order to get by in English. This idea worked well in Portugal, and after this first visit we have many more students who are excited about the upcoming visits to Italy and Spain!

Secondly, the students on the "Let's Get Social" course are excited about communicating with their counterparts in the other partner organisations. They really hope that their blog will be interesting to students in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Poland. They are also looking forward to seeing what other students in the other countries are doing.

As to increasing online communication, the meeting in Portugal showed concretely what we have already thought to ourselves: that in order to encourage online collaboration, two requirements must be met. First of all, the themes must be authenticl, and really interesting to the students. They need to be such that the students can relate to them, and that they have a real reason to do what they are required to do. Secondly, although we hope that real, authentic interaction will grow out of this, initially a structure needs to be created with set themes and a preliminary schedule.

After doing all this, we hope that this project will encourage our students to reach out to the other students and that they will all share things with each other, be it in the form of stories, pictures, music, or whatever else they can think of.

Tuesday 19 October 2010

COURSE ON DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Here the plan of the course we'll run in Italy.


Course

Monday 4 October 2010

Interim survey

A link to the interim survey of our Partnership.

Interim survey

Are there things we should consider when starting the second year of the project?

Agenda for Portugal

Our next meeting in Leiria is approaching fast! Here is a link to the agenda of the meeting:

Agenda for Meeting III in Leiria, Portugal

Friday 17 September 2010

Let's get social - the course has started

We have 13 enthuastic students of which 4 is coming to Portugal with us. The start was great and we are really looking forward to experiences it'll give us.

You are more than welcome to read our blog.

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Let's get social! Course plan

Reeta and Sirpa have worked out a detailed plan for our course "Let's get social!". We plan to bring some students from this course with us to the IEOL meetings in Portugal, Italy and Spain. Also, one part of the course will be contact with students from partner organizations.

Here is a link to the plan: Let's get social!

We would very much like to hear your comments about the plan, so that we can make the course even better!

Tuesday 1 June 2010

Meeting evaluation Poland

Here is a link to the feedback summary of the meeting in Lublin:

Evaluation of meeting in Poland

Meeting evaluation Finland

Here is a link to the feedback summary from the kick-off meeting in Finland:

Evaluation of kick-off meeting

Monday 31 May 2010

Summer is coming to Finland


Greetings from sunny Finland! We are getting ready for our summer holidays, and wanted to share with you this photo from a weaving class. It reminded us of this wonderful time when nature comes to life here.
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Thursday 6 May 2010


Hello dear partners!

We are following with the workshops about information technology as you already know. Next Tuesday, we have a new session.

We are almost at the end of the academic year and at this time, we have a lot of different activities in the centre and some of them are outside, in the streets, since the temperature is excellent. As an example, we have made a "MayCross" in our playground. This is a traditional party that is celebrated in Andalucia to welcome the spring and there you can find a lot of flowers and traditional decorative objects. Here you have a photograph.

Our students that are taking place in the course so as to get the official certificate have already done the examination and the results have been great. Almost all of them have passed them.

In the next weeks, we have a "cultural week". There are a lot of activities: poetry, dance, theatre, manual crafts, conferences.
We would like to share all this activities with you all.

Best wishes from you partners in Spain

Monday 12 April 2010

Course plan for next year

The Valkeakoski team has made a course plan for next year, incorporating contact lessons and online work. Here it is:
**********************************************************************************
Course: English in authentic environments
Duration: 9 Sep. - 25 Nov. 2010 and 13 Jan. - 21 April 2011
Contact hours: 12 + 12
Teacher: Sirpa Paavilainen

Course description:
The aim of the course is to use a foreign language in authentic environments, to learn about your own and other cultures and to use social media tools for interaction. The participants will meet face to face every other week, and meet online between lessons. Contact lessons will consist of meetings with foreign visitors and guided visits to local places of interests, such as museums. The language of the visits and guided tours is English. There will also be contacts with European partners. The students will have an opportunity to travel with the teachers to meet partners in Portugal, Spain or Italy (additional cost). An ICT teacher will participate in the course to assist in using social media. The course is suitable for everyone, regardless of language skills (not for absolute beginners). Spanish and Italian can be used in communicating with European partners. The students will benefit from having the possibility to use the Internet outside of class.
**********************************************************************************
This text (in Finnish, of course) will be published in our course catalogue . We would like to hear your comments about our plan. What do you think?

Monday 22 March 2010

Project Plan 2

Here is the project plan for the next period.

Friday 19 March 2010

Presentation of Spanish Partners

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Pictures from Poland

Here are some pictures from the meeting in Poland:

Meeting in Poland


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Monday 15 March 2010

Vlk Presentation

This is the presentation by the Finnish partner.

Portuguese presentation, meeting 2

Here's Filipe's presentation.
Ieol
View more presentations from garantjo.


Friday 12 March 2010

Micro-Credit

If you are interested in micro-credit, there is a NGO that i recomend.
www.kiva.org

Thursday 11 March 2010

Johanna

Ok you are not so bad!!!

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Meeting in Lublin

Dear Partners,

We are waiting for you in Lublin impatiently. Below find the agenda of our meeting.
See you in Lublin!

EIOL - Grundtvig
2nd Project meeting
Meeting agenda
Lublin 10-14.02.2010

10th February – Wednesday
Arrival of delegates

Dinner

11th February – Thursday
9:00 meeting in a hotel lobby,
transfer to IRZL Main Office, ul. Naleczowska 30, p. II, room 209

9:30 – 11:30 Project work – progress reports by partners on activities within last
months
11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break
12:00 – 13:30 Project work – ICTskills innovative testing system ECCC
13:30 – 14:00 Lunch
transfer
14:30 – 15:30 Visit to Catholic University in Lublin

17:30 transfer from hotels

18:00 – onwards Welcome dinner in traditional restaurant (hosted by IRZL)

12th February – Friday
10:00 – 11:30 Project work – e-learning/ edu-teleconferencing software presentation
11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break
12:00 – 13:30 Project work – Picasa mini-workshop
13:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 16:30 Project work – summary of the meeting, plans for the next project
period

Visit around the city
Dinner in the old town

13th February – Saturday
Visits of surroundings/departure of delegates



14th February – Saturday
Departure of delegates

Tuesday 26 January 2010

Dried salt cod

Hello everybody!
As agreed I am sending you the best Italian recepi to cook the salt cod (bacalao / bacala / turska / dorsza )

Dried salt cod “alla vicentina”
Ingredients.- 1 kg of dried salt cod, 1 small onion, 1 clove of garlic, 4 anchovies, 1 small spoon of finely chopped parsley, ¼ of a litre of white dry wine, ¾ of a litre milk, 3 spoons of olive oil, 30 grams of butter, 50 grams of grated parmesan, salt, pepper, flour, cinnamon.

Preparation.- Put the dried salt cod in fresh water for 48 hours (change the water every 6 hours).
Cut the dried salt cod in square pieces (more or less 5 cm). Dip each piece in flour and put them in a baking tray. Sprinkle all the pieces with a lot of grated parmesan, cinnamon (not much), salt pepper. Finely chop the onion and the garlic in thin pieces and fry them lightly. When the thin pieces of onion and garlic become blonde add the anchovies (cut in small pieces). Fry again for few minutes. Add the parsley and the white wine. When all the wine evaporates, add the milk and the butter. As soon as the butter melts away, pour the sauce in the baking tray covering all the pieces of dried salt cod.
Put the baking tray into the oven to reduce the liquid. Serve with polenta and white wine.

Here you are the recipe to prepare the polenta.
Ingredients.- 250 grams of corn meal, 1 litre of water, salt.
Preparation.- Pour out the water into a pot, add sufficient salt and the corn meal mixing continuously. Heat the water (and corn meal) until it boils and let it simmer gently for one hour (mixing continuously).


Now is the best time to cook the Dried salt cod “alla vicentina”, not in the future.
Enjoy your salt cod and have a good time there.
Francesco