Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 8 Visibility of eTwinning Projects Newsletter 8 | Page 42
Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2018 Newsletter
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Monkey”. Since we were able to buy “Mbots” and
other robots, students got very motivated to learn
how to programme them and we started using
“mBlock Blockly” and “Makeblock” on iPads and
smart phones.
Students had to work on three programming
challenges and on the last one, had to work on
mixed nationality groups on Scratch projects
chosen by them, finishing or improving each other’s
productions, teaching and helping each other as
they could chose together what to build.
Our students started using ScratchJr to build
collaborative stories when they were 8 years old
and enjoyed it very much as they were able to
animate their characters, use speech bubbles or
include their own voices and sounds.
All apps were to their liking and used with great
enthusiasm, all but Scratch! Scratch is a project of
the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of the MIT Media
Lab and it is available free of charge. It is a
programming language and online community
where teachers and students can create their own
interactive stories, games, animations and much
more!
I was very keen on using Scratch in my classroom,
but, I never expected that my students didn’t find it
very appealing. They were able to create some
scenes, animate some characters, but, contrary to
what I was used to, they weren’t running to the
computer in the morning to finish their work and
kept on starting a new story instead of finishing the
ones they had in hands. I think they were really
needing Scratch 3.0!
After thinking about it, I have decided to look on
eTwinning platform for a project on Scratch. A
project where my students could communicate,
collaborate and be enthusiastic about learning all
they could, Scratch included, and I found just that
on the eTwinning project International Scratch
Challenge#2.
This was a very well thought project. Students used
the Scratch blocks on their own native language but
that could be easily changed to English or other
pretended language on the Scratch platform itself.
After a while, and working with a French school, my
students were living messages in French as well as
in English and using “Google Translator” to better
communicate with their French partners and happily
receiving messages in Portuguese.
In spite of the project’s name, on this eTwinning
project, classrooms were encouraged to participate
on other initiatives as “Code Week”, “Hour of Code”
and “Scratch Day". Reading about “STEM Discovery
Week 2018” we’ve decided on participating with a
dissemination activity, bringing coding and robotics
to students and classrooms who didn’t work on it.
This activity was very successful and was replicated
in a short while as students were getting used to
showing and explaining their work and activities.
The International Scratch Challenge#2 project
brought together several classes around Europe.
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