In
Action with Students
Buth prepares a session with her students in Kuwait and Sus in Denmark
Hi Sus,
My students liked your Danish Pancakes! Therefore, we agreed that tomorrow's
chat topic will be on recipes from Denmark and Kuwait. Tell me if this is all
right with you.
Best regards,
Buth
p.s Did you have a look at the session with the cooking lessons of Tere's and
you?
Check it out here:
http://alothman-b.tripod.com/calculating_ch9.htm
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Dear Buth,
Thank you for receiving my invityation to meet your students today in Tapped In. We have, of course, already discussed how to do this the best way, it is not viable to have all fifteen girls in the same chat session; they will not get the idea of being present in a place with someone, just a lot of confusion to see all that text scroll down before they can get the point, and that I am not fast enough to reply to eventual questions. First time I tried to meet students was with Vennyıs class, I have no idea how many they were, because it was a frustration for myself, as I had, at that time , less routine in using Tappped in as a natural meeting place. It was easy to see that yesterday when Aiden was herding around with all her well prepared cats, just to get them to move from the reception to the offices took a great deal of patience. I will write more about that, as I am preparing the annotated chatlog from yesterday (as seen from my recorder). We hope to learn what happened in the offices with Aidenıs kids and our guest teachers, too.
So, I hope to meet your students in smaller groups five would be ideal. Then we will engage in an friendly exchange about cultural issues, inspired by your cooking lessons. I liked the way you employed my plain pancakes for calculating exercises, talking about numbers, measure conversions and geographical mapping is always a very needed linguistic skill. As they are beginners, they will not want more complicated activities, but eventually we can also check out the fun drawboard on your homepage.
Iım really looking forward to meet your Kuwaitian students See you in a while!
Sus
:::::::::::After the Session...:::::::::::::::::
Hi Buth and all,
It was so pleasant to meet with Buthıs class this morning. We were lucky to have an alternative to Tapped In, as 5 was having a typical connectivity problem (typical because this kind of unexpected trouble often happen when you really need a stable connection). Groupboard has a limit of just fiver participants, so I met four bright young women and we engaged in a relaxed discussion reflecting our life situations, and cultural understanding, comparing Danish and Kuwaiti lifestyle, tolerance towards gender and religion differences, and also touched the question of narrow minded generalisation where the Western world tend to believe that all muslims are evil terrirists or at least so it seem from the Kuwaiti. We reached to a mutual understanding that economic and military interests are so powerful that it is hard for the individual to have any real influence - not even in a democracy. Then, I was asked to tell about myself and started at birth (!) to get to my school days. This brought us to a discussion about school life - they find that is is an advantage not to go to school with boys, not even at university! One of the Aishaıs had a brother who was studying in Quebec so her dream was to visit Canada one day over there, as she said. She also referred to Denmark as ³over there² so I tried to explain that our culture is not so American, but I am not sure how well I managed to do so. All in all, my overall impression was that our conversation was fluent and rich, but maybe my sentences were a little too long for beginners?
We also tried the collaborative drawboard for some fun in the introduction phase, which might have had a good stress reducing effect, but after a while, the text became so interesting that the drawing lost interest. At the end, we designed our national flags.
I saved the Groupboard chatlog for you and your class, Buth, by copying and pasting the text field into a Word document, I just need to figure out what was the file name and where on my harddisk it has been stored. I need to go out but will be back later this evening and have another look.
Yours, Susanne
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Dear Sussane,
Thank you very much for the chat session with my students this morning.I also have stored the chatlog on a floppy disk.I have just come home; and I will soon read it and then think of a way to send it to everyone.Unfortunately, I didn't have time to ask the four students to tell us about thier experience of chating with you, as most of them had to rush to their other classes. I can't believe how they talked to you for 2 hours without being distracted by other activites that took place simultaneously.I will definitely have them talk about it next week. Thank you Sus again and take care.
Hugs,
Buth
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