Coding for English Teachers – The more the merrier!

Publication date: March 15, 2023

Alenka Miljević, eTwinning ambassador, Croatia

It isn’t a secret that though being an English teacher, I love coding as well as trying out new things, uptodate technologies that surround our students  in their everyday life.

When I found out about a new EU Code Week Bootcamp MOOC, I decided to share my passion and interest with my colleagues, English teachers, in Croatia. The possibility to address them on social media – a Facebook group – proves exactly what I think about new technologies and the media that go with them. They have become a part of our everyday lives and if any teacher can find out ways of using them to the benefits of teaching and learning.

So, I shared the info and offered my help which I think is also my task as Code Week leading teacher. A lot of colleagues contacted me and asked how they could take part and group themeselves into learning groups. There were even teachers from different schools in the same groups and not only from Croatia but also from other countries.

After the Bootcamp, in the same Facebook group, I posted an invitation for participating in an eTwinning TeachMeet webinar on the topic of coding. It would have been a pity not to have shared interesting coding activities that were created during the Bootcamp.

TeachMeet

There were 5 applications for the TeachMeet that I ran together with my dear colleague and eTwinning ambassador Arjana Blažić.

Webinar

The webinar was held on 9 January at 6 pm; It was supposed to last for an hour, but it was so much fun that we decided not to shorten anybody’s presentation to stay within the planned timeframe and we ran past the scheduled time. The interest of about 50 participants was very high so it proved us right.

Anita Žepina talked about creating postcards in Scratch with very young students.

Mirjana Jerković presented how AI can help in the process of teaching and learning and showed how she uses it in eTwinning. She mentioned the Live Transcribe app and NaturalReader app.

Anita Damjanović’s Chat is all that! The presentation taught us how to create a chatbot with Google forms and it was one of the highlights. Before creating a chatbot, students use app.diagrams.net to make a diagram of the dialogue.

Adrijana Roždijevac talked about many different coding projects in English teaching. Students were hunting for colours, coding and fairy tales, Pixel Art, Emoji maths, and 3D augmented reality where she used quivervision.com and many more.

Lidija Šaravanja and Maja Jurić Babaja showed us real teamwork as they were working in a learning team that extended their own classrooms.

The more the merrier, so they had a great party while coding.

To discover all the ideas I invite you to check the webinar recording.

We keep proving that eTwinning and EU Code Week erase borders both between countries and school subjects and bring knowledge and people together!