A key question for any project built on partnership is that of working together. Partners need to be clear as to how they will co-operate and share tasks, materials and ideas.
Fortunately, eLanguages offers tools for collaboration, such as the Discussion facility which allows partners to share thoughts and ideas. The forums can be used too for promoting discussion and perhaps pupils will use these as a way of contacting their peers.
The project page itself is a place where teachers can deposit completed documents, sometimes those prepared by pupils and sometimes those prepared by teachers for whole-class teaching or as support for pupils. Images, such as digital photos can be placed there for display with explanatory captions or in a gallery for others to peruse. Don’t forget to thoroughly explore all the tools available for you on eLanguages: they really can help!
It may be that other means of collaboration will be used in addition to eLanguages.
For teachers of languages, who naturally wish to use the projects to improve target language performance in addition to other aims, it is vitally important to decide to what extent pupils will be allowed to use their mother tongue as well as the target language. Given the limitations in target language competence of learners it is wise to allow some use of the mother tongue so as to be inclusive across the whole ability range. It is also motivating to encourage pupils to suggest improvements to the target language produced by their counterparts abroad. However, to prevent distortion by too much support from native speakers, limit the number of suggestions to three or four.
Think about each question below before going to the Project Notepad where you can make very brief notes before committing ideas to the project page on eLanguages.
- How will teachers collaborate?
- Will they use the Discussion on eLanguages only or as an extra to email?
- Will they post shared documents on eLanguages?
- Have you a clear idea of which documents will be posted on eLanguages?
- Will pupils share documents such as their presentations or voice recordings?
- Will pupils work in their own language, in the target language or in a mixture?
- Will pupils be able to help each other in their respective target languages? How and to what extent?
Next Section: Section 4: Getting the technology right
Project Notepad
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Click to download |
