Collaborative Creative Writing

Erasmus+ “Travelling words”

2014-2016

In order to make our students aware how languages diversify over time and influence others by loanwords, in order to increase their motivation and to involve them to the use of ICT, we decided to use a commercial real-time collaborative editing system [https://www.pbworks.com] to promote collaboration and distance learning.

We have firstly created a workspace for teachers [travellingwords.pbworks.com] in order to make teachers familiar with the system and set also the guidelines for the students’ workspace. 13 teachers of all 4 schools were active in the workspace, 3 teachers of the Greek school as Administrators and 10 of the other schools at the beginning as writers.

The aims of the project were a) to prepare students for future collaborative working and b) to prepare materials [art and drama project] in order to present them at the end of the school year [graduation ceremony] celebrating the opportunity we had to work with teachers, students and parents of other countries.

The coordinators of each school selected names and e-mail addresses of the students and informed them about PBworks. Internal projects [i.e. travellingwordsgreece1.pbworks.com] have been also scheduled in order to make the students familiar with the system.

The Greek coordinator has created a workspace [travellingwords2015collaborativewriting.pbworks.com] and added coordinators and teachers of all 4 schools as Administrators this time, so that they could add their students and follow their activities in detail. In this workspace 8 teachers and 44 students were active.

4-teams [blue – green – orange – red] were created and each coordinator oversaw one team but also “followed” and “advised” the other colleagues concerning his mother tongue and possible “improvements” including loanwords or reborrowing words.

Each team has included 4 writing groups on the topics: food – music – school – sport. Each writing group consisted of 4 students [one from Bulgaria, one from Greece, one from Romania and one from Turkey].

The students have been working on writing projects and shared them. The members of each writing group could read and critique one another in a supportive way.

The writing samples have been short, depending on the subject.

Writing group: music

We have decided to celebrate the “birthday” of our project. We have worked together with students of the four participating schools using the system PBworks, searching for videos of the song “Happy birthday” in all four languages, listening to the songs, adding the texts and following along by reading the words. We have sung it and we have created posters using the web 2.0 tool  http://www.postermywall.com.

Writing group: sport 

One of the most interesting topics for our students is sport. Therefore our students have been asked to find common words on the topic and share them with the students of all four schools using the system PBworks.

squash, skiing, sailing, polo, rugby, tennis, lacrosse, sport, paragliding, Olympics, racquet, athletics, yacht, goal… were some of the common words they have found.

Afterwards our students had to write dialogues or short texts and create a poster using the web 2.0 tool http://www.postermywall.com.

Writing group: food 

What are the most useful words when you are travelling? Some of us think of “water” and “food”. Therefore our students have been asked to write their favorite dishes in the PBworks, to translate them into the 5 languages [the common language is the English one, as it is a great help in their try to read all the alphabets of the 4 countries].

Then they had to write a dialogue imaging that they were in a restaurant in London and they couldn’t speak English. Unfortunately the waiter couldn’t speak their mother tongue either. So in their try to make them understood and order a dish they had to use a loanword from English or at least a word which sounds similar to an English word. They could choose words from the previous exercise such as … tuna, iceberg, ketchup, spaghetti, hamburger, ravioli, salad etc. These dialogues have been presented in the graduation ceremony in each of the 4 schools.

The third assignment for our students was the creation of a comic-strip using the web 2.0 tool http://www.storyboardthat.com. They had to use the dialogues of the previous assignment.

Writing group: school 

Our last topic couldn’t be something other than “school” of course.

Our students have been asked to write words on the topic and translate them into the 5 languages.

Then they had to write a dialogue using some of these words [ie. Math, geometry, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, sports, music, schoolbag, professor]

The third assignment for our students was the creation of a comic-strip using the web 2.0 tool http://www.storyboardthat.com. They had to use the dialogues of the previous assignment.