The “covid time“ does allow us to meet our project partners live. We should have visited the Spanish school in March for learning activities, but instead most of us are locked at home on distance learning. However, we decided to face the situation as we can and do at least something!
On Friday 26th March we met with our partners online in a Zoom videocall. Spanish pupils were at school, so we could at least see their classroom. Czech and Latvian kids are still at home on distance learning, so they joined the meeting individually.
The videoconference needed great planning. We teachers met a few weeks in advance to organize the details and then we even had a prep-meeting with kids. Czech pupils needed to learn working with the Zoom application because they hadn´t known it at all.
Every child prepared some intro information about themselves and a few questions for their pen-pals. Each country also prepared a presentation about the country, city and school. You can see the presentation of Latvia here on https://www.relive.cc/view/vDqg7KJzmGq and the Czech and Spanish presentations are attached in PowerPoint.
Even if some children couldn´t participate, there were 37 pupils and 4 teachers present at the videocall. Everything went well without a hitch and we spent very pleasant 75 minutes of mutual talk.
We were happy to meet our friends at least this way and it has given us new motivation to work. We hope that the world will be “normal“ one day and we will meet for real….
Hana Břoušková
FEEDBACK
After the videocall, Latvia and Czechia gave the pupils a feedback questionnaire to fill in. These are the Latvian results:
83,3% answered that they liked the videoconference and admitted it was not hard to prepare for this videoconference (66,7%), only 33,3% (it is 2 kids) said it was hard to prepare for the conference (as they had to learn quite a lot in English).
Everybody (100%) would love to participate in Erasmus conference once more!
The things kids liked during the videoconference:
I liked that I could hear others and meet others (“others” means Erasmus partners!)
I liked to answer the questions.
I liked to ask questions.
I love that it was possible to meet friends and pupils from others countries.
I liked to talk and to get to know who they are.
I liked to know about them and their cities.
Czech kids liked the videocall, too, even if most of them would prefer using Teams application instead of Zoom. They liked the fact that they saw their friends, what they look like, even if some didn´t like the fact that they had to have their webcam on all the time. Among suggestions for the next meeting we could find for example more mutual questions or „group talk“ (dividing children into smaller groups as it is possible in break-out rooms in Teams). Here are the results.