Translating learner voice

Creative Connections

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Miles Berry and Fiona M Collins

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Aims

• Promote pupils’ voices
• Increase perceptions of connectedness
• Exploring how European identity is understood and expressed
• Facilitate conferences (with digital catalogues) to disseminate the project’s work to a wider audience of student teachers, teachers, policy makers and academics
• Facilitate pupils’ trans-European discussion

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Participants

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Creative Connections

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Ideas

Constructionism

“Learning ... happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.

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Papert 1991

From ICT to Computing

[Children] need to be given digital building blocks to inspire them to build digital content. It was Meccano in my day. Today's children need digital Meccano.

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Livingstone, 2011

Curriculum 2014

3.1 The national curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.

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3.2 The national curriculum is just one element in the education of every child. There is time and space in the school day and in each week, term and year to range beyond the national curriculum specifications.

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DfE, 2013

Computing 2014

A high-quality computing education equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world.

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Pupils are equipped to use IT to create programs, systems and a range of content.

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Computing also ensures that pupils become digitally literate – able to use, and express themselves and develop their ideas through, ICT.

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Be discerning in evaluating digital content

Understand the opportunities [networks] offer for communication and collaboration

DfE, 2013

Audience

The idea that the relevance of student work no longer ends at the classroom door can not only be a powerful motivator but can also create a significant shift in the way we think about the assignments and work we ask of our students in the first place

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Will Richardson, 2010

Negotiating the blogosphere

Active reading and involvement through comments and hyperlinks combines with regular posting to support the co-construction of meaning... Blogs in and of themselves, do not necessarily promote social participation.

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Davies and Merchant, 2009

Quadblogging

“The new kid on the blog in student media – for any age group – is Quadblogging. Four schools or colleges, agree to take it in turns to read and comment on each other’s blogs.”

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Guardian, 7/10/11

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Implementation

CC by-nc Xerones

creativeconnexions.eu

Creative Connections (public)

Quad 1

Quad 2

Quad 3

Pages

Quint 4

Quad 5

Quad 6

Sandbox

Coordinators

Teachers

Pilot

Posts

(images, articles)

Google Translate

Google Translate

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Connected / disconnected

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creativeconnexion.eu

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Response

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Stats

6 countries

6 languages

6 universities

5 quads (1 quint)

25 schools

694 participants

961 posts

1646 comments

1781 images

41603 words

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Reviewing translations

20 examples were given to different translators

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• A limited number were completely understandable
• Overall the gist of the posting was understandable but the detail was missing
• Vocabulary was good except where pupils had misspelled words
• Main errors were linked to incorrect grammar and syntax

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Views on translation

• UK primary pupils were very positive
• Finnish pupils – some wrote in English, but some Sami pupils wrote in Finnish and English – the roughness of the translation didn’t bother them, because they were bilingual
• Some teachers found the interactions online hard to manage. One positive outcome was that an Irish teacher thought that her pupils had developed greater empathy with their counterparts in Catalonia because of the commonality of the minority languages

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Lessons learnt

• On the whole, we achieved dialogue

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• Focus?
• Images in comments
• Interface for translation
• Machine translation already ‘good enough’
• Integration of technology

Questions?

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Miles Berry

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m.berry@roehampton.ac.uk

@mberry

milesberry.net

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Fiona M Collins

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f.collins@roehampton.ac.uk

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creativeconnexions.eu

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These slides: bit.ly/naacetlv