Natural Treasures of Europe

Newsletter February 2012

Evaluation of project progress
The necessary evaluation of our project progress has to be done until March 15th, so that we can discuss the results in Braga. Of course I will send the data to all coordinators with the next newsletter. How is it done? I would like to ask all project coordinators to fill in their thoughts on the work done so far in an online questionnaire. I would advise the coordinators, that each of you talks with their team of teachers and pupils BEFORE answering the questions. We would like to have a team feedback from each country not some opinions of several different persons. Each country should fill it in only ONCE. Here you can find the questions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dC03ZjlQR1V1eTVQc2RyX0RRb mQ5a2c6MQ#gid=0 As the number of volunteers to create questions for the evaluation was (how to say it in a friendly way ?) very low, actually ZERO, I did the questions together with a German colleague. So the evaluation contains only questions, WE think are important. Probably we have forgotten some, that would have interested you, but actually as we had NO SUGGESTIONS at all, we relied on our own thoughts. Anyway I hope that it will be appropriate for at least most of you. If you have something special in mind that is not tested in the questions before, you can state it in some fields in the end, where you can enter free text. It is the place to write down suggestions, criticism or you can also write some flattering messages ... As we wanted to keep it easy, we did it in Google spreadsheets, but we are actually not quite sure if it really works. If you experience any technical difficulties, please report them to me quickly and we will try to solve the problems.

Questionnaire
Up to now several hundred (!!!) participants have filled in our questionnaire. I am really happy with the participation. As there were some mistakes done, I want to apologize for the misunderstandings and wrong translations of some questions. On the other hand I think, that the problems were not that big and we can be content with the work that was done by all preparing countries and also the responsible persons in the German team: Johannes Almer and his students. We will keep the questionnaire online until February 25th. So all of you who have some participants left or are motivated to do some more entries, please do it in the following days. You will find the link to the questionnaire and an explanation how it is done on our homepage: www.natural-treasures.eu.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors. The Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.

Natural Treasures of Europe After the deadline we will create an EXCEL file to analyse the data. I will send this file to the coordinators of the countries of Poland an Slovenia, who are together with the Germans responsible for the evaluation of the questionnaire. More details and first results will be published maybe in the next newsletter or during the meeting in Braga. If you are interested on how our pupils worked on this questionnaire, you can take a look at the report Julia Decker and Leila Dedial wrote on our homepage soon.

Foto contest
As a next topic I want to thank all responsible teachers in the participating countries, that they have managed to motivate their students to take pictures of nature and to participate in the foto contest. A special thank you very much goes to our Turkish team and especially Bahar Alkan who took good care of the organisation of the contest in our Facebook group. If you haven't voted yet, you can still take a look at our pics. There are really some very beautiful pics to see. It's worth to take the time. If you want to vote, please keep in mind, that every person has only two votes. So take a look at all the pics first and then like the two pics that are best in your eyes.

Homepage progress
Our homepage has again grown a bit bigger in the last month. Take a look in the section of helpful ICT tools. There you will find some pdf-files on how to make a video film and so on. I don't give you a link, because I want you to take a look at more of our homepage . The flag counter should register some more clicks ... On the other hand I still want to invite you to contribute some things to our web page by writing articles. I could imagine that e.g. some members of the Turkish team write something about the foto contest, the rules, the way it was done and the winners. I also would like to invite the winners of the foto contest to tell us something about the pic they took. I also think that e.g. the Portugese team has already done some really cool field work. Maybe a short report written by pupils and containing fotographs of the field trip could enrich our project web page very much. And also Maria's idea of the sharing of postcards for Christmas should be mentioned on our web site. I guess we all have taken some pictures of these beautiful cards that could be uploaded to our web page. As I think that we do not have that many contributions, because some of us are not used to work with Yoomla. So I think that we will have to learn about using this tool in Braga, so that everyone is able to publish articles as we stated in our application. If you have trouble or technical difficulties in writing in YYoomla, please feel free to get in contact with Peter, who managed to create a good looking web appearance so far.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors. The Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.

Natural Treasures of Europe

Mobility to Portugal
Most of us have stated the details of their journey in the Google spreadsheet about the mobility to Portugal. Due to the good pre-organisation of the Portugese team I do not think that I must write a lot more on this mobility except that I guess we are looking all forward to meet you in Braga and to taka a closer look at the miracles or Geres, that I have only seen in Facebook pictures so far. I have a question that is perhaps only necessary for the German bureaucracy, but as a matter of fact, we need it: Can we get a formal = official invitation from the COMENIUS team in Portugal for the meeting? We would need such an invitation for every teacher. If you can send us a signed document as a pdf-file it would be fine to print it out. Maybe other countries might need it, too. Another thing I would like to repeat: Peter had a good idea about common rules for all participating students during mobilities. I like this idea and would suggest that those of you, who have already done these mobilities should share their experiences with us, by preparing a common paper of rules.

Mobility to Turkey
Although we have not yet done the mobility to Portugal our next trip to Turkey is still not far away. I think we should do it in the same way as we have done with the Belgium and Portugal meeting. The Turkish team will know best what hotels are good and make a suggestion. After that we should decide on a common accomodation. I am sure that the Turkish team will provide all necessary information on accomodation and the programme of our visit soon, so that we can organise the necessary details in our countries.

International movie
In some countriues the spring season has already arrived so that probably a lot of you have already started the shooting of movies now. Again I would like to remind you that there is already a beginning of a movie script here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yOougTozeL0SBXeNqoxSHfL1XOmFHKAjTyqCNEy6p0/edit?hl=en_US# As there are not many contributions up to now, I guess it is necessary that we take the time in Braga to discuss the script in detail and to point out which scenes are necessary for each country.

Teaching material
Only one short point on that topic: upt to now there are no teaching materials at all!!! If you want to change this situation, please create some materials and publish them on the website Please use only our chosen templates for preparing your teaching materials. If you experience any technical difficulties in using these templates, please let me know.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors. The Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.

Natural Treasures of Europe

Communication and cooperation

As I stated in one of the first newsletters: Our communication could be better. I would like to add, that our communication MUST be better. It is really difficult for me to write all these things and I do not get any or only one or two feedbacks on a newsletter or anything else. We should look at our students and take them as an example. They communicate within the facebook group. We don't. Sorry to say that in such clear terms, but this is really a thing that is annoying me badly. So I would like to have a talk on that issue with all coordinators in Braga. This is very important to me and should be done in a face to face conversation not via email, because I have the feeling, that nobody reads my mails anyway.

Upcoming tasks
Reading the application I see these points coming up soon: 1. End of the foto contest (February 25th) 2. End of the first questionnaire period (February 25th) 3. Evaluation of our first project stage (March 15th) 4. Publication of teaching materials. All countries are responsible for that. 5. Starting a seasonal ecological message contest (coordination by Turkey and Poland) 6. Organisation of a common audiovisual glossary (coordination by France, Portugal, Turkey and Italy)

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors. The Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.