Our project Practical Learning English through Multimedia and ICT (PLEMICT) should help to improve new creative methods and skills in the field of teaching and learning English through programming presentations in Smart Notebook programme, use of information and computer technologies and creative work with multimedia. Nowadays, we feel a great change in priorities of students. We find very difficult to motivate the students for learning. The participant organisations of this project are three European schools. VOS a SS slaboproude elektrotechniky (Vocational College and Vocational School of Electrotechnics) from the Czech Republic, a coordinator and the applicant of the project. Our partners are Zespol Szkol Elektrycznych im.Tadeusza Kosciuszki w Opolu (Electrical Highschool in Opole ) from Poland and a new partner, who has never worked in any European project, Seyhan Anadolu Saglik Meslek Lisesi ( Vocational Health School) from Turkey. The intention of this project is to reunite needs of school education, preparation for international language exams (e.g. Cambridge exams) and preparation for national final secondary education exams. In this project we would like to make the students learn actively by searching for suitable information on the internet and in books preferably in English, creating presentations in English and learn to recognise actively the most important rules of English grammar. The targert group of this project are students of the first classes of our schools, who would form three creative groups of 20 students in each country. During three years they would make presentations of topics connected to their own countries realia on topics arranged in advance for each month. For each topic the students in cooperation with their teachers should send to their partners 10 presentations of at least 6 slides each . The texts of these presentations with specific information about our countries should be adapted for learning English language. These presentations should consist of reading and use of English exercises without the keys of level B1 or B2 of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). By work on presenting their countries and getting more and more information about our partners, their way of life, their schools, countries and history, the students will not only learn the language in a natural way. The students will prepare naturally (by thinking about English language rules) for international certificates of the language.They will be forced to read much more than only at school lessons and they will compete with the other partners, which will motivate them to work as well as they can. During the next 2 month period the answers should be sent back by the other partners with a short assessment. The assessment will mark each presentation from A(the best work in the file) to D (not so interesting or accurate work). Students with the beat results will get a small reward. The project will be divided into three periods according to three school years of the project. These periods will consist of training, exchange of materials and presentations, meetings and dissemination work months. Competition meetings should revise mostly the specific information which the students have learned about the partner countries. Dissemination activities,project exposition, project posters, presentations for primary schools and special schools for disabled children and organizing competitions and performances for other schools in our countries. If the project shows good results in improvement of learning and teaching languages, we will expect it to be just the first step to change the attitude to teaching nowaday generation of students. in the future we would like to continue in this way of teaching. Especially, we would like to teach our specialization subjects English language practically through similar activities and support implementation of English specialistic terms naturally into teaching of every subject. This might contribute to our students ability accept and successfully work in their specialization jobs all over Europe. We hope to decrese risk of their unemployment and support their adaptibility in English speaking firms and their ability to keep in touch with quickly developing terms (mostly untranslatable or not translated well) and inventions in the field of science.
Our project of Strategic Partnership for school Education no. 2014-1-CZ01-KA201-001894, PLEMICT, Practical Learning English through Multimedia and ICT (PLEMICT) started to improve skills of pupils and teachers and show new ways of learning and teaching realia of involved countries in English language lessons (the Czech Republic, Turkey and Poland) in a different way through multimedia and ICT. Three involved partner schools: Zespol Szkol Elektrycznych im.Tadeusza Kosciuszki, Opole, Poland Seyhan Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi ,Adana, Turkey and the coordinating school Vyssi odborna skola informacnich studii a Strední skola elektrotechniky, multimedii a informatiky, Prague, Czech Republic. The target group of this project were pupils of the first classes of our schools, who would form three creative groups of 20 students in each country. During three years they made presentations of topics connected to their own countries realia. The topics were arranged in advance for each month. For each topic the pupils in cooperation with their teachers sent to their partners 10 presentations of at least 6 slides each . Altogether we made 450 presentations in a programme Smart Notebook, which is widely used for interactive boards. The texts of these presentations with specific information about our countries were adapted for learning English language. These presentations consisted of reading and use of English exercises. During the project preparation time we decided to programme the presentations of level B1 or B2 of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) with keys included. By work on presenting their countries and getting more and more information about our partners, their way of life, their schools, countries and history, the students learnt the language in a natural way. The pupils prepared naturally (by thinking about English language rules) for international certificates of English language. They were forced to read much more than only at school lessons and they compared their presentations with the other partners. This motivated them to work accurately. The project was divided into three periods according to three school years of the project. These periods consisted of training, exchange of materials and presentations, meetings and dissemination work months. Competition meetings revised mostly the specific information which the students had learned about the partner countries. As dissemination activities we prepared project expositions, project posters, presentations for primary schools and special schools for disabled children and organizied competitions and performances for other schools in our countries. The project showed good results in improvement of learning and teaching languages. We created 450 presentations and we expect it to be just the first step to change the attitude to teaching nowadays generation of pupils. More information about our project to be found on its pages: https://plemict.wordpress.com/ Presentations of our Polish partner are available on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B9yrRAJ8tTSFfm92TmFOS0gxUWFJWTg0V29ya3N6SWk0X2hBWGJhc1VKZHhWZkZDZlhmS0U Using this storage the Czech and Turkish partners faced some problems to download their presentations. That is why we decided to create another storage for the Czech and Turkish presentations: http://is.sssep9.cz/podklady/erasmus/ In the future we would like to continue in this way of teaching and with our partners we are working on other possible project ideas. As an unexpected result of our project we created a book of illustrations of a welknown Czech poet and singer, Mr Robert Krestan. this book will soon be available at http://is.sssep9.cz/podklady/erasmus/. A very important result of our project was as well the friendship among our pupils. The pupils got a detailed information about their partner's lives and their culture through the presentations and especially during the meetings. All the participants, the pupils and the teachers all still keep in touch through the Internet. After the end of our project, we are planning to use all the presentations during teaching and learning process at our school and we have downloaded our presentations on the Internet to allow all interested teaches to use them. All our pupils who participated on programming our presentations received certificates of attendance. As well we are discussing a possibility of receiving a certificate of knowledge from the firm of AV Media, which uses Smart Notebook programme for their products. This might contribute to our pupils a better chance to be employed all over Europe. We hope to decrease risk of their unemployment and support their adaptability in English speaking firms.