Culture Course Finland - Namibia from the teacher's point of view

                       

                          NETNAFI    PROJECT  2004
               
          KIURUVESI UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL, FINLAND
         

Our culture course started this project in late September 2004 and finished it in December 2004. At the beginning of the project, our geography teacher made a trip to Namibia with some other Finnish teachers to prepare for the
work which was done in the course.

During the project, our students were able to learn a lot about the country, exchange a few emails between Finland and Namibia and produce written presentations on paper.

Namibia is far from Finland, connections are not easy as the school terms and holidays don't match and work was slow to start.

But this was only the start and we hope that one day we will be able to continue our cooperation with Namibian schools, using new technology more and exchanging views on curriculum and education. And as the result, learn from each other.

Marjatta Ryan
Teacher of Culture Course
Kiuruvesi Upper Secondary School

If connections worked well, i.e. if our Namibian collaborators had sufficient email connections in use, this type of project could be continued in every geography course of upper secondary school.

During the autumn, two students of the Namibia course completed Geography course 4, called Regional Geography, where the aim is to get acquainted with one country or one municipality chosen by the students themselves.

Now we are trying to get email replies from Namibian students to our students’ questions concerning Namibian hazards, risks and threads caused by geographical phenomena. This theme is covered in course Geography 3, called Course on Hazards. Namibia is mentioned twice in this connection in our textbook. There could also be chances for cooperation in Courses 1 and 2, in the form of email in a couple of contexts.

An example of the use: if we received replies from Namibia, an autonomous learner of geography could produce an article in the eJournal for anyone to read and then it could also serve participants of other courses. The article could perhaps be translated by another autonomous learner in an English language course.

Anja Sirviö
17.1. 2005
Teacher of Geography
Kiuruvesi Upper Secondary School, Finland