Newsletter 3: Progress Meeting Crete: Progress till March 07

M.Eleftheriou Tue 8 Jul 2008

CRETE Progress Meeting Heraklion 26-28th August 2006

This meeting should have been held in Szczecin in July but was postponed because of the illness of the Coordinator and the venue changed to Heraklion.

Good progress has been made in the 9 months since the Startup meeting. PESCALEX website online at http://www.pescalex.org 26th May, with design previously approved by all partners. The site uses a content management design, which allows for a variety of useful features. Each partner has a username and password to log in to the secure site, which holds the test version of the language modules, with a News Section, Download Section, and Administration Menu which contains the inhouse secure email provision.

The Beginner Language module has now been designed and processed in English, while the translations into French, Spanish, Norwegian and Polish of the 24 Level 1 and 2 lessons are being carried out. The partners were able to test all the above features as well as the available content. They made suggestions and recommendations which will involve a lot of redesigning and reprogramming. The backend of the site should be reprogrammed to allow the translations of content to be instantly accessible( at the click of a mouse). Some changes to the content of the Beginners\' modules in French, Spanish and Norwegian were made, which will also involve a good deal of extra work.

Basic Techniques in Fish Haematology course translations went well, but Fish Health Management and Cost Effective Feeding for Fish were waiting for updates before being translated. The Fish Disease module was also held up for finalisation of species selection. However, the Basic Techniques course (3 units) was online in all 6 languages by January 2007. The Fish diseases new material was received in November 2006, and work started on adapting the material for CLIL presentation. The adapted verson of the Carp module was ready by the end of 2007.

A Spanish team from CETMAR attended a CLIL conference in Helsinki in June 2006 and made an important presentation which completely changed the thinking of the PESCALEX partnership concerning the pilot materials, both from the Content and the Language perspective. It became very clear that a team teaching approach, uniting both Content and Language specialists, was mandatory for successful language learning to take place. It was also very clear that online materials could play no more than a supporting role in CLIL methodology.

Invention of new CLIL tool

The partnership therefore decided that the best way to make use of all the extremely relevant materials being developed in the project, was to invent a new type of learning tool capable of optimising the PESCALEX CLIL potential. The partnership language specialists came up with the idea of inventing a language game, based on one of the content modules, that could be either a simulation game or a board game, involving student teams of different nationalities, led by content teachers. This approach could simulate the team teaching approach advocated by current CLIL methodology.

STOP PRESS

Mrs Eleftheriou had a monitoring meeting with LEARGAS in November when the CLIL adaptation of the Carp module was demonstrated.

Next meeting to be in Crete in May 2007.

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