People and places
Broadening horizons Filiz Hayta describes a six-country project
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of all countries, and invited the entire town. We created international teams with participants from all countries, and eventually we chose the most successful group. Our students prepared for this game for a long time and their English has shown incredible improvement. After each transnational visit, we produced a newsletter about our events and visits, and in doing so our students learned how to use ICT tools. We regularly organized interviews in English with students and teachers of other countries about national and international literature, so we learned a lot about literature of other cultures and adapted our everyday life. We check each student’s reading habits with monthly surveys, and have created a reading corner in our school to improve reading habits. Students and teachers borrow these books when they want to read them. Because the reading corner is in a fairly visible place in the school, students are constantly excited about the books, and the idea of reading is always in their minds. In Portugal, we divided into international groups and gave the groups names such as Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare and Jane Austen; we took photographs and wrote stories about many places in Porto. We made these stories into movies using ICT technologies and congratulated the best group Autumn |
Spring
I am a teacher at Burhan Felek Anatolian High School in Istanbul, Turkey, whose students are aged between 15 and 18. Our school has participated in many national and international cultural activities in order to improve the learning process of our students. Recently our school project team participated in the BookPals@Schools.Eu Erasmus+ project, which was organised jointly with Croatia. In the project Turkey partnered also with Cyprus, Poland, Hungary and Portugal. The project aimed to improve the reading habits of young people in schools and to strengthen their use of English in daily and academic life. With the help of students and teachers who took part in the project we can see that they learned to use new education technologies, new learning methods and ICT. In two years with the project’s help we discovered new cultures, new educational methods, and new languages. We had many inputs for our school in these years. Through the visits and the travel undertaken by our students, as they stood in other partner students’ houses, this experience represented a real cultural exchange. Our students visited five countries: Hungary, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Portugal. We staged a play named ‘Good morning Teacher’ in Croatia, with the participation
| 2018
