Polona Drenik Trop, Petra Čalić, SŠFKZ

The paper is a clear presentation describing the many usesof e–portfolios in the clasroom by our students at Secondary school of Pharmacy, Cosmetics and Health Care in Ljubljana. Six teachers and two departments of students were involved in our project team.

This paper is introducing the use of e-portfolio within a subject Entrepreneurship. The students have undergone four cycles while using e-portfolio in the classroom, by starting with concepts of business ideas, to creation of virtualenterprise, which is integrated into e-portfolio as a business plan and introduction of a new enterprise. Exchange of experiences and opinions made some productive (so called “critical”) friendships among students.

Availability of Entrepreneurship teacher and technical help, along with introducing of Mahara’s apps by teacher of Computer Science, was continuously there for all the students involved.

The survey sheet done by our students, after the finishing fourth cycle of the process, has clearly shown the following: e-portfolio was used for school work only, linkage with Facebook was found, it is useful to use since all the data are systematical to be found somewhere in the web sites, knowing of term critical friendship and how to become one, difficulties they dealt with were mostly ones of technical nature, like how to add a file or editing of the view.

The use of e-portfolio has demonstrated as advisable and useful tool by providing a systematical saving of worksheets, single tasks, researchapproaches and tasks, interpretation of results, graphic displays, photo displays and implementation of views that can be defined independently by students.

Iztok Škof, Osnovna šola Toma Brejca

Our priority is to encourage students to develop critical and creative thinking and problem-solving abilities and decision-making. We help them to build up competencies of 21^st century and to acquire skills for life.

To individualize instructions and learning for each student and his learning abilities was our primary goal. We would like to transform the curriculum so that it will be closer to the pupil and his curiosity. We wanted to teach students how to think, to look for answers to the questions, to ask the right questions and get the answers.

Curricular connections, as identified by various authors (Škerjanc, Rutar IIc) allows integration through content, activities, teaching methods and procedures (eg, active learning, project-based approach), the use of learning tools (eg. ICT, thinking processes, skills and habits (eg. developing critical thinking, creative thinking, problem solving abilities and decision-making, the so-called skills for the 21^st century).

So we connected with the geography course, in which the students discussed the South and Southwest Asia. Each student got his teaching unit and guidelines for the work from the curriculum. First, they made a draft of a final product, and then the presentation for interactive whiteboard. Presentation to the classmates was performed in the end. Each student needed to prepare activities for classmates and thus checked whether classmates understood the presentation.

Mateja Tovornik, Osnovna šola Dobje

Tablets and smartphones offer a wide range of uses of different applications and tools. One of such tools is program Socrative (Socrative – Student Response System). Socrative is an online tool using laptop, tablet or smartphone to carry out quick, anonymous or by-name examination using predefined quiz. Using by-name examination allows us to monitor an individual and his progress more easily. Fast graphical and numerical feedback information about student’s pre-knowledge allows us to rank students in appropriate groups for work in main class stream. Online tool Socrative is easy to use. Students enter with room number, which eliminates any problems with forgotten passwords. To work with, we only need network access and appropriate device.

Nevenka Mandelj, Osnovna šola Litija, Urša Bajda, Osnovna šola Tončke Čeč Trbovlje in Javni zavod Osnovna šola Marjana Nemca Radeče

In tendency to digital literacy we cannot ignore the media literacy of an active learner. With the power of ICT and modern mobile devices, learners can enter into the school library from their home beds, on holidays, anywhere through its blog – an online diary. With a properly planned school library blog, teaching can be carried out outside school walls and library shelves. Media literacy competency, like all competencies, adopts gradually, until a learner develops an ability of critical evaluation of various media contents. With the assistance of school library blog, we can approach learners the ICT as a learning environment, that exceeds the space of games and peer conversations (mostly monosyllable words).

In contribution the authors represent two different school library blogs, which each on their own way, deepen students’ ICT skills, and enable media literacy a supportive environment.

Litija elementary school library blog fully introduces an extracurricular activity of young librarians, who actively engage in various national and international projects. Among other things, they created an innovative book trailer, abroad recognized as The Book Trailer.

In Radeče elementary school pupils are, among other things, joined in a debate club. Since pupils attend several debate tournaments a year, they prepare to them by exploring a wide variety of informational sources – the media. Through their school library blog, pupils also inform a wider community about their interests, achievements and dilemmas.

With this contribution the authors want to emphasize the importance of school libraries in the digital era, and draw attention to a long ago exceeded physical space of the school library, which could become a successful virtual learning environment – respectively a teaching tool.

Mojca Filipčič, Osnovna šola Vincenzo e Diego de Castro Piran

The paper examines the use of blended learning in English teaching blog in the ninth grade of elementary school in connection to cross-curricular links. Through the analysis of various activities on the blog the paper gives a hands-on approach when dealing with cross-curricular content in authentic English texts and avdio-visual content. 

Boris Volarič, Osnovna šola bratov Polančičev Maribor

Edgar is not a web service. Edgar is not social media. Edgar is a storyteller. Usage is as simple as his definition. Primary school pupils are able to get familiar with him within less than a lesson even without the help of the teacher. In this paper we will show that anything can be as simple as that. Being able to always extract the essence from the floods of factual information, multimedia and interactive resources and then present it in seven chapters of the story. We will show how »out of the box« thinking can transform every, even the most professional topic into a story, which the students will never forget, and how we can transfer these skills to our pupils while having lots of fun. Legendary American storyteller Edgar Allan Poe was reincarnated as a web address edgartells.mewhich hides the project “Swiftly, and with style.” It is a practical example how even highly specialized topics, such as Cascading Style sheets (CSS), can be presented quite popularly. And that even nine graders can do it. Who would have thought that Edgar can combine storytelling, computer science and English? Some call it a cross-curricular integration.

Katja Skubic, Davor Zupan, Sara Drožđek, Matej Zapušek, Jože Rugelj, Univerza v Ljubljani, Pedagoška fakulteta, oddelek za matematiko in računalništvo

We started making this game in order to present the subject of functions and procedures in an interesting and fun way to pupils, who are learning to program and develop their algorithmic thinking. Adding humor and motivational elements to the game, we tried to achieve that pupils will enjoy playing the game, and with that gain knowledge about creating algorithms. The topic is quite difficult, that is why we decided to include a lot of interesting activities, which we present in an appealing storyline, to ensure the transfer of knowledge. The game was developed during the subject With information and communications technology supported learning materials on the Faculty of education in Ljubljana, department of Mathemathics and Computer science, as a group project. The article describes how we made the game, the script, included activities and learning goals, which we want to teach with this game. The final product is an example, how to create a didactically appropriate, theoretically based game, which hides the learning goals in the games context and allows pupils, while playing the game, unknowingly learn important concepts about programming. The game still has to undergo beta testing, and also needs to be tested in primary schools. After the testings are done, we will, based on the results, improve the game, where improvements are needed. 

Bernardka Radej, Zavod Antona Martina Slomška, Škofijska gimnazija Antona Martina Slomška

Excursions are part of the secondary school education. When incorporating innovative approaches of learning and teaching with ICT into our “innovative classes”, we decided to alter the concepts of fieldwork which is becoming authentic and has moved out from the classrooms, and involves active students participation in the planning phase (expenses, route, content, sightseeing), photo and video coverage, the use of e-guides (agencies, museums, galleries, public transport). Students also use different devices for evaluation and documentation of the chosen subject area (a wider selection of choices possible) and to complete survey questionnaires in order to improve future work.

After two years of experience we have noticed the students are actively involved in all phases of the authentic classes, develop their creativity and communicative skills in a foreign language. They have also improved critical thinking and managing electronic devices. Parents are actively involved in the process and communicate with us through social networking sites during the excursions. This year before the excursion to London we organized a parents – teacher meeting conducted as a video conference. 

Lidija Jug, Osnovna šola Sladki Vrh

The article presents the research activity in which the students also use the tablet PC to explore geometric shapes by assembling parts of the tangram. Tangram is a centuries old Chinese puzzle, which consists of seven parts, which are basic geometric shapes. We put together various figures, in which we must use all seven pieces, which must not overlap. With mathematical logic games we deal at an optional subject called mathematical workshop. The introduction to the research was to make their own tangram by folding a sheet of paper, following the instructions. The challenge for us was to compose a triangle, a square, a rectangle, a parallelogram and a trapezium from the parts of the puzzle. We also set up a new rule for constructing, where was not necessary to use all seven parts. We proceeded with the task systematically: we started with one part of the puzzle, then we continued with two parts of the puzzle, then three parts, etc. and we were finding out what shapes, listed above, we can make. The emphasis was on the research: from how many parts certain shape is made. The students were using the tablet PC, where they were trying to find the solutions with the help of computer application Tangram (preinstalled on the tablet PC). Students found this kind of work interesting, some of them even met the game tangram, which allows many possibilities to explore, for the first time.

The use of ICT equipment is an important factor that contributes to improvement of the quality of teaching. For the teacher and for students, as well as, it represents a better, more interesting, faster, and in some cases, more concrete work in the classroom.

Lucija Žnidarič, Aleša Žandar, Tadej Bogataj, Matej Zapušek, Jože Rugelj, Univerza v Ljubljani, Pedagoška fakulteta, oddelek za matematiko in računalništvo

Mysterious Surini is an educational computer game created for children attending both elementary schools as well as high schools where they may find themselves learning the basics of search algorithms. The game gives the player a piracy-themed adventure, where he learns and internalizes the workings of the Dijkstra’s algorithm through well-selected activities. Dijkstra’s algorithm is used for finding the cheapest path in a given graph. The algorithm is used in various fields of science, for example computer science, where it is used for routing packages of information that travel through the internet, making it useful for children to know about it. The design of the game is adjusted to the school environment, making its learning objectives hidden and offering a fun gaming experience. The player embarks the game as a friendly pirate, where he helps the governor of the island Fantan to find his missing daughter Arabel, who was kidnapped by a hostile tribe, the Tantams. He can only succeed if he successfully finds his way through four islands. To do that, he must find the least dangerous paths to all hostile tribe houses on each of the four islands. In this waye collects coins, making it possible to complete the game. All the four islands together represent a complete learning process of the above mentioned algorithm, whereas an individual island is used for the representation of a single learning stage. Mysterious Surini is a new opportunity for all teachers to embed a learning game in their curriculum, making it more interesting and diverse for the children as well as simplifying the process of learning while getting better results than ever before.