Hello dear colleagues,

I'd like to say thank you for your hard work in this project and for the help that has been offered to me whenever I have needed it. I am compiling all the information and work that I have been doing during this year regarding this project in order to present a summary of it. So far I can say that my students have worked all the skills and what's more, they have enjoyed every part of it!  Looking forward to share our summaries!

I just finished the final summary, uploaded some audio samples and pdf documents with some of my students' own portfolios. As agreed with all members of this group and according to the message I received a few days ago form our collegues in Marbella, we should all be finished with our work by the end of this month.

It was my pleasure to work with all of you, both at school and with our collegues in Marbella. I hope to start again soon with a new project proposal or further assets for this one.

Cheers

On Friday the 12th May, my students worked Crazy Tales in order to develop their reading skills.

As part of reading techniques, students had to order the events of the story by looking at the pictures, after that I asked them to describe the main characters and the places seen in the different parts.

They enjoyed with the activity and also decided to modify and design some new pictures for the story!

Due to the fact that my students of 2nd Year of Eso are working a unit that deals with food, recipes and healthy habits I have decided to include some portfolio activities to increase their knowledge in this topic.

Apart from preparing a Final Task that describes a cooking recipe and in which the students have to record themselves preparing it, I have included some previous activities to help them in this final proyect.

As mentioned the activities worked have been as followed:

Title: Dividing Recipes  and Cooking Recipes

Date: 7th April 2017

Skill: Reading

Our aim is that students are able to understand words and simple sentences  regarding cooking instructions.

The feedback has been appropiate and students have increased their language skills development.

Before Easter I asked my students to sign in on the Spanish European Portfolio website. That was part of their Easter assignment which some of them have already turn in. They had to click on their current abilities with English as a foreign langage.

Sice I was adviced to include evidence of our work in class with students I will upload an example.

PS

Students signed up with an alias. I recommended them not to open their accounts with their real names.

Last March 16th I was summoned to attend a meeting in Marbella. Once there, they provided me (and other groups' coordinators) with some info and specific instructions on how to upload our project journal on our web platform.

I was there for three hours, so the second presentation was about a new methodology for
teachers called "Lesson Study". The presentation was made by a very young college teacher or scholar of sorts, who seems to have lived and researched for a long period in England. They suggested we could take up the same topic to launch a new project in the future.

To end up with, we held a meting with some other coordinators, who intruduced their own projects. When I spoke about out work, our ideas were received a warm welcome. All other teachers there thought it was an interesting project.

I would like to encourage you and let you know you are doing an excellent job. We just
have to keep working until the end of May and then we just have to write a report and
upload the content on the platform.

I'd like to keept you uptodate with my work this week: What I did was I handed out two pieces of paper with some self assessment worksheets for levels A1 and A2.

I asked the students to click on the corresponding items according to whether they thought they had reached every different ability or not and then, they had to write a summary analysing their results.

Since I delivered these sheets among students from the bilingual gruopus, their anaylisis showed that they - in many aspects - are overconfident. It means that almost all of them think they are over A1 level.

Needless to say that they claim they are better with receptive skills such as reading or listening and not so with productive skills live having a conversarion, writing or speaking.

Many of them say that they are having trouble with their spelling, vocabulary, day to day expressions, grammar and things like that. Surprisingly enough they make spelling mistakes in Spanish when they try to explain what their abilities are.

There is one thing I am sure of: they feel comfortable and self confident when it comes to studying English. That is, in my opinion, highly positive.

In my opinion we've had more administration work to comply with than actual and real interaction with our students:
on one hand, we all have to work two extra hours with our students and we are so forth, under high levels of stress. 
On the other hand, three of our group memebers were very busy with their "practicum" project paperwork". 
We did not have the best students either if I may say so.

There are several tasks I have been working with: To start with, I had to organize our meetings. There were not many
free hours in which we could meet and so I had to take advantage of the time when we had English Department meetings.
All in all, We have actually had more info exchanges during our break time or chatting along the school corridors. I had
to do many web searches to look for relevant information and I had to upload some opinions and meeting records.

All of us, one way or the other knew about the Eurpean Portfolio. We all knew how to access the worksheets and had
a set of avalable resources, so that every member of our group has rendered and shared his or her individual info and
individual ways to work with different materials. Of course I am very satisfied with our work in the sense that a large 
number of students know a bit more about the Eurpean classification of language mastery and they can now assess their
own growth and development in language knowledge.

From the human point of view, it has been a good chance to know and analyse different ways to work with the same 
materials. We have exchanged bits and pieces of info that we would not otherwise. We have exchanged emails, opinions,
a technological framed environment and got to know each other in more detail.

It has been my first time as group coordinator and I do really appreciate having the experience and I have been glad
to work with all my colleges both at school and with CEP representatives. I would also like to say thank you to all the 
members of my group, because they have made me wiser so far and I expect to spend the rest of the school year working 
along with them.

Hello,

Just a few lines to give an update of the feedback of my students when working the Portfolio activities.

Last week we worked the worksheet " Beaty and the Beast" as the unit we are working at the moment deals with the topic of TV and Films, the feedback was very positive, we worked the reading and the activities and also watched the trailer of the film with is about to be released at the cinema.

The students liked the activity and ended the class expressing the comparison between the cartoon and the new version of the film.

First of all, I must apollogise for joining so late, but most of you already know about my misunderstunding: I did not know about the change of platform, and I kept waiting for this community to show up in the old one.

I will present the portfolio to my students during this term. In 4º ESO I have already commented on the use of the portfolio and also, about the different levels of linguistic proficiency according to it. We will develop this matter further very soon.

We are going to hold a meeting next Monday. I am very happy with our team¿s work. Apparently everyone has been working really hard on it. All in all, even though some of us haven't designed specific material for our project, all teachers have found a way to apply their day to day teaching to our global goals and purposes.

I have to confess I have been myself a bit down and blue lately, but the email I received from our assigned supervisor with our group's approval, has eventually put up my spirits and I feel now like getting started anew and again.

I hope we all keep on going and ejoying our common effort.

Cheers for now.

Some of my students have turned in samples of the worksheets I asked them to do, but I had very few of them though. It was good work. The students who gave me their homework perfectly understood what they had to do and made sense of what I had told them.

I could not find a on Inetermet a way to create your own digital portfolio. The site seems to have disappeared.

We are all very busy now, I know, but I would like to thank you all for your effort and encourage you to increase your activity in order to analyse our results in further detail. In our next meeting we could discuss the possibility that students create their own "dossier".

Cheers

My students, a bilingual group of the 2nd year of Compulsory Secondary Education, showed a positive feedback when the Portfolio was introduced. They all filled in the Language Passport section and are very keen in having a record of what is being learnt in the foreign language.

At the end of each unit they will be able to record what has been acknowledged through a checklist regarding the contents studied.

This will be done the following week.

Regards,

Virginia Jimenez Jurado

I'd like to give you a very quick update of what has been going on lately with our work group.

I sent you an email with a link to the Andalusian worksheets database from where we can collect som ready made practice.

I've personally had some difficulties to open the audio files with our classroom linux desktops.

I can't find the link to the European Portfolio European tool on Internet. So I'll try to find an alternative document that can help our students draw their own passport.

I introduced students the Portofolio topic and explained to them what it was all about. It was three groups I have been working with, but I only asked my bilingual students to turn in compulsory assignments.

That's all for now. Let me know if there's some news and don't forget to send a message on the discussion forum from time to time.