Experiences from 1st International Day from a Lecturer’s perspective
Following the 1st International Day in the DLAB2 project, lecturers from the two Danish groups met to reflect upon the experiences of the day. The meeting took place at the school immediately after the teaching sessions with the observations freshly in mind.
Overall, there was unanimous agreement, that it had been an exciting day with committed teacher students and pupils. Both teacher students and pupils were excited to collaborate with pupils from the other countries and they were curious about getting to know them and their school through the introduction videos.
The two Danish groups each had their own year 6 class to teach. The introductions to the DLAB2 project and the 1st International Day were similar for both groups of teacher students. They introduced the changemaker objectives and informed about the use of technology to create solutions for the problems at hand concerning crossing physical boundaries.
However, the rest of the day was planned very differently in the two groups with different emphasis on changemaker abilities and the use of technology for creating solutions. For the teacher students in group 1 it was important to thoroughly introduce the changemaker skills and therefore they used a large amount of time discussing what a changemaker is, how you become a changemaker and which skills a changemaker has. In addition, the pupils were given written tasks, where they, among other things, had to discover changemakers in their own countries and identify problems that would call for changemaking. The time used exploring the changemaking part of the project unfortunately resulted in a lack of time for hands-on experience and exploration of the new technologies. The pupils did not have time to try out any of the new technologies on the first day.
In the other group emphasis was placed on exploring the new technologies, and the pupils worked together with the teacher students in getting to know the programmes and digital artefacts. Thus, the pupils in group 2 got a lot of hands-on experience with technology. As a result, less time was used on identifying problems concerning physical boundaries and understanding changemaker skills.
Although the 1st International Day for both groups was a great success with solid learning outcomes, our experiences from the two different approaches has led us to conclude that it is important to combine both knowledge of changemaker skills, problem identification and solving, together with introductions and tests of the technologies in order to ensure a solid foundation for the future work on the 2nd International Day.
Henriette Hjelm and colleagues