Creating links with a primary school in Finland

Introducing ourselves

Collaboration between the two teachers, Michael and Jyrki, began almost immediately. Emails introducing ourselves, and our schools and areas, started things off. A booklet about Yester and the village of Gifford was sent to Jyrki in Finland. Photos from each other’s summer holidays were exchanged, as were photos from each other’s school classes, which immediately allowed for discussion and comparison. Jyrki sent pictures of his school, which were incorporated into the layout of the blogs.

Including local information

Michael designed the blogs, and personalised them to a high degree, including such things as the current weather in both places, time in Scotland and Finland, and webcams and links to places of interest locally, so that pupils from both countries would be stimulated to learn more about the other country.

Permissions and aliases

It was decided that the first introductions from Yester children would be posted in early September, after parental permissions had been received allowing the children to appear on the blogs. Children were also given aliases, in order to protect their identities. Again, collaboration from both sides allowed this process to be performed quickly and smoothly in both Scotland and Finland.

Posting the first messages

Once the first Yester posts appeared, Jyrki’s class read what was written with great interest. Although Jyrki had warned that the Finnish replies might be slow to appear due to the fact that the children were inexperienced in using English, in fact the wait for replies was only two weeks. Again, the Yester children read the replies very keenly. We had started!

In early October, the idea of commenting individually on posts was introduced by Michael - and this has developed the blog immensely in a very short space of time! Over the course of the first five weeks, since commenting from both countries started, more than 400 comments between the children from the two classes have appeared on the blog! This is an extremely impressive statistic. Both teachers have again collaborated, so that the pupils from both countries are online at the same time each week, allowing for 'live' comments to be passing back and forth simultaneously, moderated by Michael before they appear on the blog.