INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS AND VISITORS

Our eLearning attracted visitors from Australia

Our school had two very distinguished visitors from Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning. Director Stphen Harris and deputy principal Craig Harris had found out about our innovative eTwinning projects in the Internet and wanted to learn more about what we do here in Orivesi.

They were on a two week research trip covering interesting schools and teachers in New York, London, Birmingham, Oulu, Orivesi and Helsinki. Their special interest was focused on eLearning in general and particularly collaborative learning in Moodle environment.

Craig and Stephen spent the morning in our school and in the afternoon they quickly visited upper and lower secondary schools and the new school in Rovastinkangas.

The visit was very inspiring and very successful in the way that we decided to start a shared collaborative learning project with a class from Sydney next autumn. Fantastic!

eTwinning teacher visited our school

On Monday the 6th graders of our school had a very special English lesson. Primary school teacher Panayiotis Kampylis visited our school and answered all kinds of questions our students could think of.

Panayiotis Kampylis or "Pan" is in Finland starting his PhD studies and research in the University of Jyväskylä. He got a scholarship for a thesis, which will be dealing with ICT (information and computer techonology) and visual signs used as learning aids.

In Centre School we already got acquainted with Pan last spring, when his students in the 2nd Primary School of Philadelphia in Athens were partners with our 6th graders in an eTwinning project.

The current 6th graders interviewed Pan and we learned a lot about him and Greece too. He has a wife and two daughters, who will probably come to live in Finland when Pan really starts his research. He likes donkeys! Pan is especially interested in both rock and traditional music, technical work, computers and he also likes dancing Greek dances. His favourite school subjects are music and physics.

Quite a few of our students were willing to move to Greece immediately, when they found out that Greek children have a three months summer holiday and two weeks holidays at Christmas and Easter.

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