Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2013!

Hello from German class!

Hello from German class! Den 17. Dezember 2012

We’re going to tell you about what we do in German lessons. Our group us tiny, there are max. 4 students in it.  We have done many projects, for example a presentation about Austria and Wien. We’ve studied German irregular verbs. We’ve played a lot of Wortjagd, which is a word-puzzle game in German. We’ve only had one ordinary exam. We have used a lot of modern learning tools such as iPad and computer. We also have Promethean ActiveBoard in our classroom. We’ve written fairytales and diaries. We can post our homework to WindowsLive. We’ve have watched badly dubbed Simpsons. We’ve eaten candy and gingerbread. (By Henrik, Aleksi and Iiris)

Our modern classroom

Playing Wortjagd!

Our condolence

Christmas celebration

On Saturday 15.12 Patamäki community celebrated end of the semester at school.

Teachers and students had prepared nice Christmas presentations. The gym was full of parents and grandparents enjoying singing familiar songs and watching the program.

2nd grade together with godstudents from 6th grade performing Elfs at Work.

Parents Council sold pastries and cakes of Christmas taste for funding the culture trips for students in spring. Patamäki staff thanks for help and activity!

maybe some cakes?

something warm for the Christmas present?

12,12,12

The day when teachers went crazy :)

12.12.12 12:12 o'clock will be remembered by all students and staff in Patamäki.

The staff suprised the students during the break at 12:12 o'clock sharp by doing a FlashMob. All were wearing cool baseball caps and dancing Gagnam Style music coming from the headteachers car stereo. It was such a fun for everyone!

At the end we made the numbers 12.12.12 in the school yard and had some photos.

What are 21st Century Skills?

Hot topic with all school developers is 21st Century Skills. What an earth are they? The current Finnish curriculum is valid only couple of years and the new one is available to Finnish teachers and school leaders to be commented until 5.12. So hurry up to impact to get your opinion and update it also from this point of view!

Here's an interesting point of view how a group of more than 250 researchers across 60 institutions worldwide categorized 21st-century skills internationally into four broad categories:

• Ways of thinking. Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning
• Ways of working. Communication and collaboration
• Tools for working. Information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy
• Skills for living in the world. Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility

Source: ACTS

Farewell Global Forum!

Day 4 saturday was full of hard working together with couches and mentors. Among other we made disruptive questions for other groups and found a lot of insipration to our projects. What if...

After visiting on the teacher track trying to find the winner candidate it was time to settle down in group photo.

On Saturday night amazing week culminated to Gala Dinner where all the teacher competition winners were awarded. Everyone who stand in the stage felt great respect for the job well done together with 600 teachers and school leaders from 60 different countries. Atmosphere was like in Education Olympics. The Gala included also an official publication of the new mentor schools. Congratulations Metsokangas Comprehensive School!

Day 5, Sunday morning: After saying goodbye to all new friends and partners it was time to go home. The whole week gave to all of us a lot of faith, tools and thoughts how to meet the future together with our students. Looking forward to take next steps with our Pathfinder partners. Thank you coaches, mentors and Microsoft!

Your ideas matter!