Teacher Voices

"The main challenge for my students was to really get to know a person just by knowing them online and to lose that anonymity that you have online and making a real connection there. That was difficult to do for them, but it also posed a challenge for me. I didn’t know that I had to pay so much attention to the first phase and that I really had to put some effort into the ‘getting to know each other activity’. This is definitely something I need to work on next time because the first connection during the first session is so important to make the entire project work, and it’s definitely worth putting some time and effort into establishing this.

By establishing a real connection my students did learn that their life is not the life that everyone lives. Their world is not everybody’s world. We did a telecollaboration project with a school in London, which had a very diverse ethnic public. We also did a project for Dutch with other students in secondary education in Flanders (Belgium) and even that was enriching for our students: to see how other people still speak more dialect than they do for example. Our students had the same age, they had a lot in common but they also had a lot of differences and by establishing a connection with their “partner students” they learned that there are differences but that they also have a lot in common, even though they look different and talk differently.

I definitely see a future for telecollaboration in education, there just has to be! We don’t live in our little town anymore. We don’t live in our little country anymore. We live in Europe, in the world even, in a global space. Therefore there has to be an opportunity for students to have authentic communication with other students around the world, that is the only way forward."

“The challenge for some my students is that they have to come out of their comfort zone. Some students normally hide during the entire class and only give an answer when they really have to. For these students it’s really hard to come out of their comfort zone. They still work in groups during my exchanges, so they can still hide if they want to. However, working individually isn’t an option since this would be far too big of a step out of their comfort zone.

To counter the challenge of getting out of their comfort zone, I let my students work in groups as said before and I also make sure that they are very well prepared, content-wise and language-wise. The assignments they get aren’t unknown. The students know what they have to do and this lets them face the challenge of telecollaboration with confidence. It is a positive and uplifting experience for these students when they notice that they are able to carry out the task with their language competences and they are extremely proud when they notice this, and this again is a boost of confidence for them and lets them come out of their shell during the following classes and exchanges.

The biggest challenge for myself is getting the technical side together. You have to have enough equipment, the equipment then has to work and the students have to be familiar with the equipment. I spend at least one hour before the first telecollaboration exchange on getting to know the equipment with my students. And even if everything works on beforehand, it’s always possible that something goes wrong at the moment of the exchange, and that’s not always your own fault. If anything goes wrong at the moment of the exchange, my advice is to make sure that you are in direct contact with your partner (via your smartphone for example) and try to solve it at that moment, but don’t waste too much time. If speaking via videochat really doesn’t work for example, we allow our students to use the chat function.”