We spent our Wednesday evening making our presentation for Friday. We took pictures on different places to be able to use them in our show. Mirjami visited the Roman Bath taking pictures there. The whole group visited the huge Anglican Church Bath Abbey built in 1499 and the house telling about Jane Austen.
Thursday was a day of a school visit to a St. Gregory's School, which is a Catholic secondary school. We spent the whole day observing science lessons. Lessons were pretty much the same as in Finland. The younger pupils made yougurt and rockets to illustrate different phenomena. The school was stated to be ''outstanding'' in inspections. On Thursday evening we accidentally find our way to a restaurant called Sally Lunn's, the oldest building in the city, built in the 15th century. We had there a delicious meal and enjoyed the atmosphere.
One of the main things we noticed when observing different lessons was that learning objectives or aims were clearly announced in the beginning of the lessons, especially with younger children. During the lessons teacher checked whether the objectives were achieved or not. The atmosphere on the lessons was cheerful, learning orientated and encouraging. Seija and Mirjami had a chance to attend a biology lesson where the subject of the lesson was hormons. It was interesting to follow the questions and reactions of the teenage pupils. On Thursday evening we produced a little movie.
On Friday morning we woke up early to pack our luggage and to tidy our apartment. The course started at 9.30 am. Friday´s task was to make a presentation. We worked in groups, five groups altogether, and each group gave a presentation on different subjects. Our show handled "Getting to know Bath". We made a presentation containing an information retrieval task. It contained also a film with tourists of different nationalities praising Bath. The show was crowned by a Socrative test that the group participated. Our audience seemed to like the techniques used.
We also discussed Thursday's school visits. All of the course attendants found the visits interesting and we think that everyone got some ideas to bring home with themselves. After having said ''Goodbye'' to whole team we hurried up to the railway station. We spent Friday evening in London finishing our blog.
ICT lessons gave us some new thoughts. We started wondering if it would be useful to have also some PC's in our school to enable the students to get wide enough ICT skills. The working life requires diverse ICT skills. That could be useful also from the point of view of the change in the matriculation examinations.
We met new people and learned new things. We were impressed by the positive learning atmosphere in schools we visited. That is something what we would like to bring home with us. In the same time we were happy for our education system which relies on teachers. In England the outside evaluation ja competition seemed quite compelling and stressful. Creativity flourishes in an atmosphere where mistakes are allowed and experimenting is possible. Like in our school.
Now our journey is almost in the end, but the contacts stay. We have e-mail addresses, which we are going to use. The co-operation and learning will go on.
Seija, Markus, Mirjami
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