all FAQs

1 - "How many teachers and students can participate?"

There is no limitation on the number of schools, teachers and students that can participate from each country, except for the fact that the main site will show only four poems from each country (one for each ASPnet item of study). However, all the poems will be collected in a second site which can be accessed from the main website. Students can participate in many ways, both in the selection and preparation of the poems as well as in the production of the video. In the second phase of the activity, they can also rate and comment the poems submitted by other countries.

2 - "What is the specific activity to be carried out with students?"

The main result of the activity will be a video -or more- with students reciting the selected poetic fragment in the language in which it was originally written. Students, therefore, will recite the poem in their language, and AT THE SAME TIME they will make some gestures (the gestures can be made by all students, it may be also only one doing gestures while the others speak, or even each student may be making a gesture with scenery for this poem in particular, that comes down to the creativity of individual teachers and their students).

3 - "I am not a Foreign Language teacher, can I participate in this activity?"

The fact that the poems will be presented in their original languages allows every teacher to participate. You do not need to be an English teacher nor to prepare your students with materials in English. The activity can be made in a normal class (the subject can be language or any other) and in the usual school language.

The English translation can be used afterwards to produce your own translations for certain poems from other countries that you find in the final website, if you want to work with them and you find it necessary for your students to understand the meaning. But you may soon feel that the international signs can do a nice job in helping your students to understand these "foreign" poems.

4 - "Are we talking about an activity for the deaf, or for special education, that have very particular characteristics and for which there are specially trained teachers, but that does not make much sense to be shared by "normal " teachers ?"

Although the gestures come mainly from this original source, the use of YoGoTe signs is not limited to deaf people and their collective (if it were only only for the fact that they use the sign language of his country, not those of Gestuno which are not a language, but only a collection of gestures, which is a very different thing). Fortunately, these signs are open to be used by people who speak any language in the world, as an additional international communication tool. they allow to do school activities for multilingualism and language learning.

5 - "How do I work with these signs and gestures, without specific preparation?"

The project site has information regarding the placement of signs in the texts and making gestures.

The coordination of the project, due to the limited time that is available to perform the intended activity, offers its readiness to facilitate the task of the participating teachers and students in relation to the use of signs and gestures:.

This involves:

When the teacher has selected the poem (relative with some of the UNESCO-ASPnet topics of study), you can send a fragment (4 to 10 lines) to the project management:

yogote.coordinator@gmail.com

together with an English translation

In our answer, the teacher will receive:

- The text and translation of the poem glossed with international signs of the main

ideas.

-A video which gestures to enable students to make every gesture with the corresponding word.

After that, the rest will be in the hands of every teacher.

6 - "Students will understand the meaning of a poem in a foreign language through gestures only?"

The gestures have a purpose, not only for communication but also of expressiveness and sensitivity. To understand the poetic text, it will be always accompanied by an English translation annotated with the same gestures for an easy identification of expressions in an unknown language.

7 - "What video format should I use"

The teacher is free to use any format that he can upload to Youtube (or other online video streaming website as Vimeo, for example).

Then send us the link to put it in the project site.

8 - "The video must necessarily include students reciting and gesturing, or may be there other solutions, such as voice-over, music, dance, slides, etc."

Although it is open to creativity, the video of the poem must show at least some student doing international gestures because otherwise the students from other countries will have only his voice in a particular language, that they may not know.

Yet, if the teacher considers interesting to do (besides this video with students gesturing) an additional audio-visual production in relation to the poem, you can make both jobs.The site will be able to offer both options (but there will be always a video with students reciting the text in their own language while they or other colleagues make the gestures.)

For the audiovisual production (an example would be a song with slides, but it can vary), the alternative to the gestures are the signs:

In post-production (at least with Windows Movie Maker) is not difficult to put signs like subtitles using the YoGoTe character fonts. Again, if this is too complicated, we offer ourselves to make this postproduction, but for that we must receive the audiovisual mounting not only the link to the video on Youtube.

9 - "How many poems must I do?"

For reasons of clarity and simplicity, the definitive website will publish four poems for each participating country, one for each of the four UNESCO-ASP subjects of study

- ASPnet and UN priorities

-Sustainable Development (including biodiversity and climate change)

-Peace and Human Rights

-Intercultural Education

The selection of poems will be made ​​by the teachers of each country and the National ASPnet Coordination, trying to reflect in the languages ​​of the poems the linguistic diversity of the country.

The poems that are not selected will be added to an additional site, which will be accessed from the relevant pages of the main website.

10 - "How shall we do the selection of the poem?"

The poem can be selected from the existing literary production in the language of the students, but it can also be the result of a creative work of the teacher or the students under its direction.

Having chosen or created the poem, select a fragment of it (between 4 and 10 lines) which fulfills the main references to the chosen subject of study without losing expressiveness. It will not always be easy to make that decision!

The reason for this is a practical one: The website will have a very simple format. Compared with the texts and supplementary information, the most important thing will be to highlight the work of students and the overall picture resulting from the collaboration between international schools all over the world. For more complete information for each poem we recommend to create a specific page on the school website, which is accessible from the homepage of the poem in the final web.

11 - "How to gather the permissions for the dissemination of images?"

The students (or their parents if they are minors) must sign a written authorization for the dissemination of images by UNESCO-ASPnet. The Principal or the Director of the school, given the collected permissions, will sign a certification form ..

12 - "What additional information is required for the publication of the poems?"

The website will include very simple additional information for each published poem

:-Authors (of the text, the work, the video, etc)

-Images(3 illustrative photographs )

-The piece of text in the original language and translated into English, glossed with international signs of the main ideas.

-Information about the poem and its author (only three lines for each)

In addition to this information, you can make a specific page on the website of your school with any additional information that is of interest. There will be a specific link from the poem in the final web page to the school´s web.

13 - "How much time is there to do the activity?"

-. Deadline for publication of the web with the poems will be March 21, 2013 (World Poetry Day)

From that date, starts the process of the comments to the published poems, by school students worldwide.

Poems can arrive after that date, but they will not be commented as the others.

14 - "What will happen to the poems that are not selected for the final site?"

We´ll try that no poem remains without access, so our idea is to bring together all the poems from the same country or school (depending on the total number of them at the end) on a specific page of a site "in the second line" and give the possibility to access it from the main site pages.

15 - "How many gestures should we select in each sentence?"

For the purpose of illustrating poems by international gestures, it is not convenient to make a gesture for each word, for two reasons:

First, because the aim is not to translate, but to illustrate the poem . Note that in the other languages ​​of the world, many of the auxiliary words that we use in our language have no equivalent, so we will be incorporating symbols that can create confusion.

Second, because in this way we subordinate the cadence and rhythm at the poem´s reciting to the rate at which the gestures are made ​​(we can not make as many gestures as words at the same speed with which we speak, and even if we did so it would look like a windmill instead of a person reciting), and thus loosing a lot of expressiveness in the children.

Our advice is that, to make a poem, the teacher (or the children themselves), identify the main ideas (each small phrase usually bears two main ideas, while in larger phrases there may be some more). They need not to be nouns, since sometimes some names are left over, or are redundant or superfluous ornaments, and other times the emphasis is on a verb, or an adjective, or even an expression like "also", "never "," no ", etc. (whenever you see their need at that particular text.)

It may help to call out only the words chosen, in the so-called “Indian style”, and see if they convey the main meaning of the poetic text.

16 - "What happens if I cannot find a certain word in the dictionary of gestures?"

We have only 600 gestures at our disposal (which are not few), with which we have a dictionary of 2,400 entries (ie, for each gesture we have about four meanings). In the same poem, it is very rare that two gestures coincide with different meanings, but it could happen. In that case, we should try to replace one of the gestures with one that has a similar meaning, or eliminate the one that is less necessary for the poem.'s intention.

More often will be that you do not find the word you look for. In this case, we can do any of these things (if possible, in this same order, as we will be increasingly forcing the process):

-Find a synonym

-Find a word that has some relation to the desired idea

-Verify if this idea is essential. If it is not, change it to one of the other words we have removed previously.

-With your hands, make a gesture in the air, which in your view, reflects somehow the idea that we need to incorporate. In the on-line dictionary, to the right, we have the option YoGoTe-English. We search through the gestures that are similar to the one we have done, and place it on the idea in the poem.

The result of this work is not a translation of the poem, but an illustration of its intention (in a school environment), and in the final web the students from other countries will be provided with the original text and an English translation, in both cases accompanied by the same symbols, so whatever the chosen symbol, they could identify its meaning from the translation.

17- "What are the characteristics of the gestures and signs that are being used?"

These gestures have the distinction of being international. Internationalism is guaranteed by the fact that most come from the collection of 1500 international gestures published by the World Federation of the Deaf in 1975 in a book by the name of Gestuno (this book has editions in English, French, Japanese, Arabic , etc..)

The signs have the generic name YoGoTe (Japanese syllables that mean respectively "World", "Language" and "Hand"), they were developed by us and they allow us to recognize and make with relative ease the gestures. In this way, we can do what we call "glossed texts", in which a text in a certain language is accompanied by international signs for the main ideas, and thus can be shared with people from different countries and languages.