Awardees with School Principal Paddy O’Neill and Minister for Education and Skills Jan O’Sullivan.
Salesian College “Everyday Situations Blog” awarded the National and European Quality Label Award for Language 2015.
During the academic year 2014-2015 our 5th Year Spanish class completed a project under the E-twinning programme, overseen by Leargas in Ireland. This was the second time our students had participated in such a venture and this is also the second time we have been awarded both the National and European Quality Language Labels.
This project was designed to provide students with an opportunity to learn about and communicate with other language learners across Europe using their target language (in this case, Spanish) by completing tasks based on everyday situations. They were to do this using a variety of ICT skills and their work was recorded and displayed on a shared blog:
http://everyday situationsproject.blogspot.com.es
Development of the four key language skills required at Leaving Certificate level (reading, writing, listening and speaking) was the impetus behind the project design. Students also had the opportunity to develop other skills in the area of technology and worked in individual and group settings using a foreign language as their medium of communication.
Collaboration between partner schools across a number of European countries (Italy, Spain, Poland, France and Eng-land) proved culturally enriching as well as linguistically challen-ging!
We devised an anonymous survey at the end to gauge pupil response (posted on blog) which proved to be most positive. The aim to bring language learning to life and make it meaningful for our pupils was successful. Student confidence particularly with speaking has increased and, as a result, so has their motivation.