Our partner teachers from schools in Croatia, Denmark, Poland, Sweden and the UK came together in Stoke-on-Trent for a three day AMORES workshop hosted by Staffordshire University. We met to discuss how to work with their pupils and students to discover a love for literature through digital collaboration and creativity.
The workshop was led by Janet Hetherington (Staffordshire University), Dr Mark Childs (Coventry University) and Geoff Walton (Northumbria University). The aim of the workshop was to foster a working relationship between participant teachers- our experts, from across the partner EU countries. The common theme for all of our discussions was to discuss ways in which we can encourage pupils and students to engage in their national literatures, and enjoy reading. As tea and biscuits were consumed; friendships, conversations and ideas emerged during participatory workshops, during which teachers had the opportunity to meet each other, share experiences and have a rare opportunity to reflect outside of the classroom and start to generates ome new and exciting ideas to help support reading in their schools.
As part of the workshop, we visited St Mary’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Newcastle-under-Lyme. We had the opportunity to talk to children and meet teachers. Through doing this, weshared differences and similarities between schools and education across the partner countries and considered some of the practicalities in developing a reading project which used online tools.
There were also opportunities to learn more about e- artefacts. We started by all agreeing that an e-artefact is anything digital; a photograph, video, blog entry, or tweet or Facebook post. We continued this conversation by discussing what the preferred teaching and learning methods might be, what online tools teachers could use to achieve this and shared existing expertise of online tools. We then reviewed this information to start to make decisions about what teachers might do and use to help achieve the goal of getting pupils and students to engage in reading literature. We also thought about how pupils and students wanted to engage with their peers from other countries and about the sorts of technology and aspects of reading which they were most interested in. We wanted to demonstrate how this new approach, through the production of e-artefacts (for example, an animation, cartoon or film a play they have written) can be shared with other pupils and students in both their own school but also with their peers in Europe. Finally, we also discussed and identified teacher’s training needs, so that we can create an online training course to give teachers the skills to help their pupils and children create e-artefacts to share with their fellow learners across the EU. We received very positive feedback from our teacher participants. Here are some of the comments our partner teachers said about the workshop:
Emails received after the workshop
As part of the workshop, we visited St Mary’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Newcastle-under-Lyme. We had the opportunity to talk to children and meet teachers. Through doing this, weshared differences and similarities between schools and education across the partner countries and considered some of the practicalities in developing a reading project which used online tools.
There were also opportunities to learn more about e- artefacts. We started by all agreeing that an e-artefact is anything digital; a photograph, video, blog entry, or tweet or Facebook post. We continued this conversation by discussing what the preferred teaching and learning methods might be, what online tools teachers could use to achieve this and shared existing expertise of online tools. We then reviewed this information to start to make decisions about what teachers might do and use to help achieve the goal of getting pupils and students to engage in reading literature. We also thought about how pupils and students wanted to engage with their peers from other countries and about the sorts of technology and aspects of reading which they were most interested in. We wanted to demonstrate how this new approach, through the production of e-artefacts (for example, an animation, cartoon or film a play they have written) can be shared with other pupils and students in both their own school but also with their peers in Europe. Finally, we also discussed and identified teacher’s training needs, so that we can create an online training course to give teachers the skills to help their pupils and children create e-artefacts to share with their fellow learners across the EU. We received very positive feedback from our teacher participants. Here are some of the comments our partner teachers said about the workshop:
Emails received after the workshop
- “We went home inspired and looking forward to the next step in the project.”
- “Thank you very much for creating perfect atmosphere for joint work. We really enjoyed it.”
- “Thank you dear Janet, Geoff and Mark for taking so good care of us, and for the interesting and
- inspiring programme at the university.”
- “How great time it was! Thank you for all your welcome....You taking really so good care of us!
- Programme was very, very creative:)”
- “Thank you for the opportunity to work with such a lovely group of people. We are very much
- looking forward to taking part in this project and having more contact with our European friends”
- “Inspiration and relaxed atmosphere, creative and innovative ideas.”
- “The way we worked, the people, everybody seems very interested”.
- “I enjoyed meeting and talking to teachers from different countries. There was a very relaxed atmosphere.”
- “Quickly got to know the other participants and share experiences of education/school life.
- “The games that lead into good discussions managing to mix us and creating new groups, new ways of thinking.”
RSS Feed
