.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m currently in Spain, in Madrid at a bilateral eTwinning meeting for Spanish and English teachers looking for partners – for eTwinning projects.

The meeting is coming to an end today after three days of frantic activity as teachers from both countries really threw themselves into the task of making friends and influencing one another. After a treasure hunt around the sites of central Madrid, numerous three course meals and several copas de vino, everyone has found a partner or partners, and begun to formulate project ideas. So it’s been a very successful meeting – and some of the project ideas that people are sharing as I type are really interesting and creative!

One partnership are going to use digital storytelling and video to share talents between their schools with pupils acting as a Simon Cowell and judging the talents of their partner pupils.

Another group are planning on looking at festivals and cultural events along the lines of ‘similar but different’ – I know that this type of project leads pupils to not only learn about their partners’ culture but also to reflect on their own!

‘One liners’ will be based around a ‘guessing game’ involving proverbs in Spanish and English, with the partners schools exchanging one line each week that will be displayed for the pupils who will work out / guess what it means. The partners hope that this will lead to discussion of the imagery of proverbs and a comparison of similarities and differences. Apparently this idea was formulated yesterday in the middle of the session I delivered on Voki Voicethread and Audacity in eTwinning after I shared the Voicethread highlighted in the previous post called What could it mean? :o)

Another group were inspired to create a NING network in my session (and I only mentioned those in passing!) and are planning on a monthly Voicethread activity about the City of the Future – environment, culture, lifestyle etc.

I’ve had some very interesting conversations over these few days about languages and technology, and also about the use of technology in general. One delegate told me on the first night that he hated technology, couldn’t do anything technological and that his own children were banned from using computers as they are ‘evil’. Mmm! I suggested that he might like to learn how ICT works alongside his children, thus knowing what they were doing and learning at the same time, and we had a discussion about educating rather than banning but didn’t seem overly swayed by my argument! So I took that as a challenge for my session and was pleased as punch when he made a Voki in my session and declared that perhaps he could do something after all. And in the report back, he’s just suggested using online Playstation competitions as a way of maintaining and establishing links between the schools. :O)

Here’s my presentation below – and the notes I made too.
You can’t put Keynote presentations in Slideshare or Pages documents in DocStoc so the formatting is a little odd as I had to export it as .ppt and .doc :O(

Notes for Madrid – Get more Business Documents