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

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.

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.

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!!!

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.

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

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.