Class 5B in the Metsokangas Comprehensive School sent Christmas greetings to their pen pals to Janesville, USA, by making a Christmas play called Secret of elves. Students filmed this play by themselves. They used their own iPhones and edited movies with iMovie. After all, the movie was subtitled into English.

Classes 5CD made also Christmas greetings by using digital camera and shooting their play from four different directions during the Christmas Festival. All parents of seven classes came to see their play and after that night the movie was edited by Final Cut Pro X. Students also composed music by using GarageBand and at last the movie was subtitled into English.

There are some pictures of students practising and preparing for these plays.

We wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2016!

– Jaana, Petri, Minna and 80 eager students –

National Board of Education organized global collaboration seminar 25.-26.11.2015 in Tampere, Finland. Global Innokas participants Petri and Jaana from Metsokangas Comprehensive School, Oulu, took part in this seminar.

During the first day we heard an interesting presentation about teacher and student exchange programs. Via exchange programs teachers and students could have shorter and longer exchange periods in Scandinavia and Europe.

Speakers also told us why it’s important for schools to have international connections and offer their students international co-operation and friendship during the school years. The main idea was: the more contacts you have during your studying in the primary and secondary schools, the more courage you will have to use your language skills. This motivates you to study languages. Also the different cultures become more familiar and you get friends from different countries.

In one of the workshops we also got to know about a co-operative project between school from Finland and Africa. They had f. ex. made a photo book of children’s every day lives in Finland and Africa. Actually, the idea was almost the same than we are going to do with our students’ penpals from Janesville, USA. The world is so small and ideas so similar between teachers.

One of the main topics during both days were refugees and how we can take them into consideration in the school. We also talked a lot of multi-cultural and school environment and how we could give students and teachers from diffirent cultures a possibility to share their knowledge about their own culture with other students and teachers. Many of speakers emphasised the value of meeting refugees. If they come to schools as visitors, it would be great way to learn from their countries and would also dispel preconceptions.

On the other day we got a new point of view after participating the workshop under the topic ”Education of peace”. This presentation waked us up to notice that how important is to support every student to reach their own target – they don’t have to have similar target’s or way’s to reach their targets, because they are individuals and teachers role is to find the best way with the student, not on behalf of the student.

Last but not least we got a task to write down our ideas of global education in groups of four. In our group we thought that global education should be

• an encouraging possibility to meet people all over the world
• broad-minded, curious and equal collaboration between people from different countries
• a way to make people understand what kind of changes Finnish School and Labour Market will face in a near future
• a way to understand what kind of benefits multicultural environment will give all people in Finland and abroad
• a way to notice that the word ”we Finnish people” mean all people in Finland, not only people who look Finnish or speak the same language, but also people who live and work here and feel the Finnish beat in their hearts

Jaana and Petri from Metsokangas Comprehensive School, Oulu, Finland