Workshops in Tilburg!

One of the most interesting parts of our visit were the three workshops organised by our Dutch partners. One of them was about the presentation of the French mockumentary by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick. It features some surprising guest appearances, most notably by Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Vernon Walters, Buzz Aldrin and Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick.

Visit to the Odulphuslyceum, Tilburg

This is a photo with all MAGIC Comenius students and teachers that visited the Odulphuslyceum in Tilburg!

Visit to the De Pont Museum

While in Tilburg, the Netherlands , our Comenius team visited the De Pont Museum of contemporary art.

You are welcome to vies a short video from our visit!

The Dark Side of the Moon

While in Tilburg the Comenius teams followed three interesting workshops. One of them was about the "Dark Side of the Moon", the  French mockumentary by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick. It features some surprising guest appearances, most notably by Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Vernon Walters, Buzz Aldrin and Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick.

While watching the documentaire students were invited to complete a work sheet and reflect on what they watched.

Our visit to the Netherlands

Between the 26th of November and 3rd of December the MAGIC Comenius teams were met in the Netherlands! The educational visit proved a great experience for all students and teachers teams.

Υou may visit our Flickr page with hundreds of photos or view the following videos to get a good flavour of our Comenius spirit!

MAGIC Comenius students dancing on the streets after dinner!

 The Cups song - 28/11/2013, Tilburg, the Netherlands

Bicycling in the Nationaal Park De Loonse en Drunense Duinen  

 The Cups song 

Cups Song from the last night in Amsterdam

Many thanks to our Dutch hosts for their great hospitality!

The logo winner!

The new, official version of the logo for the project is here to stay! Many congratulations to the students that created it!

Voting for the logo

Today we also voted for our MAGIC Comenius project logo. Among some wonderful logos our partners created, we chose the following one:

Preparing the presentations

After our skype meeting with Dr. Vangelis Kaimakamis, our team collected the multimedia content for our presentations about Greece, Thessaloniki and our school. Students will present their products in the Netherlands. Three teams started working on each theme. Students mainly will use prezi.com for their presentations.

Skyping with Vangelis Kaimakamis

Today, 12 November 2013, our MAGIC Comenius team skyped with Vangelis Kaimakamis, the Greek ESA-sponsored medical doctor that spent his winter and summer at Concordia Research Station, on the on the Antarctic Plateau, in Antarctica! Dr. Kaimakamis arrived in the Concordia on 22 January 2013 and plans to return in Thessaloniki, Greece by the end of November 2013.

The students had prepared their questions about his research work, his daily activities and use of social media and were happy to talk with the doctor. In this way they had a first hand experience of the use of skype, a social media wide used nowadays.

The greek team thanks Dr. Vangelis Kaimakamis for accepting our invitation to skype with us!

A Journey to Media Literacy

A Journey to Media Literacy is a seven-minute cartoon designed to explain, in a fun and simple way, what Media Literacy is all about, and why it is essential in order to live freely and participate fully in society. The initiative belongs to EAVI - the European Association for Viewers Interests.

Social media networking (part 3)

Today our Comenius team met and discussed some new units to study for social media networking. In particular all five teams (magic1, magic2, etc.) will have to access their corresponding work sheets, watch some videos, answer some questions discuss their findings and share them on our blogs and facebook Comenius group.



The activity sheets corresponding to the 5 units* are the following:

• MAGIC 1: Unit 1. What is Social Media?
• MAGIC 2: Unit 2. School policies
• MAGIC 3: Unit 3. Pedagogical principles
• MAGIC 4: Unit 4. Internet safety and responsible use
• MAGIC 5: Unit 5. Challenges to adoption

As we are getting ready for our trip to the Netherlands, we set our teams to work for our school, city and country presentations.

*Parts of the activity sheets originate from the study of the "Challenges and opportunities for schools and teachers in a digital world. Lessons learned from the 2012 SMILE action research project".

Testing the Cups song

Our meeting about social media networks ended with our efforts on the cups song. Most of the students had prepared themselves and had their own cup with them. As you can see our team needs a lot of practice! We enjoyed this very first effort a lot and promised to try it again the next time we meet!

Social media networking (part 2)

The second part of the meeting on the 22nd of October started with the completion of an activity sheet. Students worked in teams again and discussed and wrote down their answers to the following questions:

1. Why do people share the information they put on social media networks?
2. Have you ever felt deceived by anything you have seen or read on these sites?
3. Have you ever had a bad experience because of something you, or someone else, posted on one of these social media networks?  If so, what?
4. What tips would you give to someone who is just starting to use these networks now?

Then we all watched the following first two parts of  an american documentary about teenagers and the Internet and discussed what mostly impressed us.

We ended our meeting by testing the famous Cups song.

Social media networking (part 1)

On Tuesday October the 22nd our team had another meeting. We welcomed our students with an exercise of self esteem in order to realise the importance of both having someone to trust and get support from when needed. We then discussed in teams about friendships in real life and in the digital world. That was a kind of introduction to start working on an online questionnaire about sharing on social media networks.

The questions and students teams answers in word clouds were the following:

 Discuss with your friends and write down as many social media networks as possible.

Which social media networks do you think are the most popular in Greece?

Do you limit the access other people have to certain parts of your profile?

Yes	2	40%
No	3	60%

What part of information do you keep more private?

Who do you limit from your private information?

What sort of personal information do you put on these sites?

Birthday	1	20%
Real friends	2	40%
School progress information	0	0%
Personal affairs	1	20%
Entertainment	0	0%
Gossiping	1	20%
Memories	0	0%
Other	0	0%

How much of the information you find on social media networks do you think is "real"?

1	0	0%
2	0	0%
3	4	80%
4	1	20%
5	0	0%

Have you ever said, posted or done anything on one of these sites that you regret?

Yes	2	40%
No	3	60%

The findings were discussed and shared with all students.

Logo competition

Today, 15 October 2013, our Comenius group had their logos ready to show and decide which two of them will represent our team. After we voted we elected the two most well designed, beautiful and joyful logos.

Here are the rest of the logos of our teams:

After that we accessed the other countries student blogs, watched some uploaded videos and pictures and agreed on a timetable for our visit to the Netherlands. Plus we promised to train enough so that we keep up with the Cups Song that our student mates from Spain already practice!

Finally, teams discussed about the questions in the first questionnaire, answered them online and then we discussed the results. We are looking forward to view more answers so we can draw more interesting results!

Questionnaire at the beginning of the project

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1yzTFCns_xdek1dAdLDAnkrJiq5IRo8AReQ6p6w9Kq2A/viewform

Third meeting

During our third meeting on Tuesday the 8th of October, we were engaged with the creation of our blogs. Students were split in five groups of five to six members: Magic1, Magic2, etc.

For each group there was set a blog administrator and author invitations were sent to all students who started writing their first posts on their blogs.

Then we discussed about joining the closed group of the Comenius project on facebook using our real names. Most of the students joined the group and uploaded their first post to the group.

There was a lot of talk about the coming visit to the Netherlands and we announced the trip timetable to the students. 

Second meeting of our team

The second meeting of our team took place on the 1st of October 2013. The students and teachers set our own rules and the we were split in four parts of five and six people. Each group discussed what would like to share with the whole team and wrote down what it "offers" to the team and what "requires" back from it.

We wrote all the terms on the white board and found a lot of similarities such as: cooperation, solidarity, nice behaviour, nonviolence, mutual understanding, sharing ideas and experiences, knowing each other and people from other cultures. We agreed on these terms and signed our team contract.

Then we discussed about how to create new gmail accounts and how to post new articles using blogger for our blogs. Further instructions were sent via email to the student accounts.

Our first "official" meeting

Today we had our first "official" meeting with our Comenius group students. Twenty two students arrived at school at 14.00 to join the meeting.

We had to start knowing each other so each one of us told the group a short story about her/his name.

Then we discussed a few things about the Comenius programme in general and our MAGIC project in particular. Teachers read the timetable of the visit in the Netherlands and everyone got so excited. It seems we will have to put the students' names in lottery to decide who comes and who doesn't.

Finally we split in pairs and had a short discussion about ourselves. After ten minutes we introduced our pair to the group. Then we talked about our feelings before and after the meeting. Some students were quite skeptical before entering the team, but got really happy to join us and start working!

We finally discussed about the creation of the magic gmail, blog accounts and logo competition. However everyone got so hungry by that time that we decided to leave and talk about the rest in our next meeting.

Thessaloniki's teachers

Hi to all!

Alkmini, Anastasia, Io and Theo are the four teachers of the 28th Gymnasium of Thessaloniki who will be running the Media Awareness Generating Informed Citizens, or MAGIC for short, project.

We are very happy to be part of this great partnership of 7 different schools from Europe and are looking forward to working and meeting all members of our team!
So let's introduce ourselves!

My name is Theo and I am the coordinator of the MAGIC project for the 28th Gymnasium of Thessaloniki.

I was born and raised in Thessaloniki and studied Computer Science in the local University of Macedonia. Then I went to London, City University, where I completed a master's degree in Electronic Publishing and worked as a web designer and editor. Back in Greece I decided to work as a Computer Science secondary school teacher.

What I mostly enjoy is working with student projects, however this is the first Comenius project I will be participating and I 'm very excited about it. I love cycling, taking pictures and, you guessed it, computing and social networking! I bake our family's bread, love travelling and making new friends!

Looking forward to meeting you all!

Find me on my MAGIC facebook account using the name TheoMagic Goutas.

My name is Alkmini. I have studied Linguistics in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and I have also attended postgraduate classes in Linguistics in Germany (University of Bielefeld, Hamburg University and University of Köln on Erasmus scholarship). The past 23 years I have been teaching History, Ancient and Modern Greek Language and Literature at high school and Lyceum level in Greek Public Schools. Moreover, I have been participating in a great range of seminars (e.g. aspects of History, Literature, Language teaching, Computers, Theatrical studies and Adult Education). Since I like learning new things, travelling, meeting new people, communicating and cooperating with them, I joined the particular project of Comenius that seems to combine all the above. I am sure that we will have great time together! 

My name is Anastasia Tsirogianni. I am 43 years old. I am married and I have  a four-year-old daughter. I have studied mathematics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. I have been teaching mathematics since 1994 and I have been working at 28th gymnasium of Thessaloniki since 2010. I like working with children and I love my work. I hope  that our coorperation will be productive and pleasant.

My name is Io Taxidou. I was born and live in Thessaloniki.I hold a BA from the School of German Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an MA in the field of language and literature specialising in Language Didactics.
I have been teaching German language and culture in secondary education for 13 years. I have attended several seminars in new teaching methods and innovative ideas. I am particularly interested in travelling, initiating collaborations and exchanging opinions and ideas. For this reason I decided to join the Comenius team looking forward to a fruitful and creative cooperation.