Trailer Ups and Downs

The project revolves around the key-word “voices”: the idea is to give a voice to teenagers, who will share their experiences with other European teenagers while improving their English and reinforcing their ICT skills. The students explore different areas of teen lives in Europe and interact about teenage related topics: their lifestyles, their backgrounds and environments, their concerns. More precisely, they investigate the hardships and beauties of teenage life, the “ups and downs” of being a teen, in a lighthearted way.

Subjects:

Citizenship, Drama, Foreign Languages

Languages:

EN

Pupil's age:

16 - 17

Tools to be used:

e-mail, Forum, MP3, Other software (Powerpoint, video, pictures and drawings), Twinspace, Web publishing.

Aims:

The aim of this project is to make the English class more interactive and stimulating through a student-oriented project. It is designed as a set of “challenges” that the partners will take up all along the school-year, and which will give them the opportunity to exchange and collaborate with other European teenagers, while practicing their language skills, listening and speaking particularly, through the use of audio and video files. The project is meant to be student-oriented; it focuses particularly on the students’ lives, opinions, feelings, creativity, etc., which are always used as the starting-points for each activity. Also, students will have to react to and work on material produced by their partners (audio, photos, etc.). They are encouraged to be creative, express their feelings and opinions, reflect on who they are. They will use English for genuine communication needs, to complete concrete tasks, and therefore improve their skills in ESL. They will learn to use various ICT collaborative tools and web 2.0 apps to communicate efficiently and work collaboratively with partners abroad, and improve their teamwork skills; the project will also promote individual responsibility by means of collaborative learning, develop inter-cultural skills and tolerance, broaden the cultural horizons of the students, and foster self-expression and creativity.

Work process:

The partners set up a schedule with some deadlines for each “challenge” – the students exchange the material they produce on Twinspace, and react to it. They have to use ICT tools, particularly audio and video tools, and collaborative apps. Students will work in national and international teams to produce material and discuss the topics. The project is conceived to be developed throughout the whole school year with regular virtual meetings and once a week team work.

Expected results:

The activities developed throughout the project will lead to a wide variety of creative productions such as video and audio files, podcasts, prezi presentations, etc. to be published on our Twinspace and a blog or website. In the process, the students will make good improvement in the language of communication as well as in their mutual knowledge and ICT skills.