STORY BOOK AUTHORS

Melike BOZAK- Çamlık Special Education Vocational School/ DENİZLİ- TURKEY

Maria KRANITI-  Eniaio Eidiko Epaggelmatiko Gymnasio Lykeio  /EGALEO- GREECE

Sevgi ERGAN-  Ahmet Kutsi Tecer Special Education Vocational School/ SİVAS- TURKEY

Katerina Tranou-  Eniaio Eidiko Epaggelmatiko Gymnasio Lykeio  /EGALEO- GREECE

Kleopatra MICHALELI- Eniaio Eidiko Epaggelmatiko Gymnasio Lykeio /EGALEO-GREECE

Mary VASILOPOULOU-  Eniaio Eidiko Epaggelmatiko Gymnasio Lykeio  /EGALEO- GREECE

Belgin AKSÜT-  Bayburt Special Education Vocational School/ BAYBURT- TURKEY

Aybüke Emine ÜSTÜNER- Talas Şehit Mahmut Yıldırım Anatolian High School/ KAYSERİ - TURKEY

Serpil GÜNENÇ- Kemal Yurtbilir Special Education Vocational School/ ANKARA- TURKEY

Ayşe KARTALLAR- Çamlık Special Education S.S. / DENİZLİ- TURKEY

This book has been prepared by the students and teachers of the             "  I Can Meet My Own Needs" project.

I am Melike BOZAK, a teacher of Accommodation Services at Denizli Çamlık Special Education Vocational School. One day, while I was teaching in my classroom, my student Ayşe asked: “You mean eTwinnig, my teacher?” I asked where you heard it. He said he heard from his friend and was wondering. Then I said, “eTwinning is a community for schools in Europe. To communicate, collaborate, develop projects, share; In short, it offers a platform for staff (teachers, headmasters, librarians, etc.) working in one of the participating schools in European countries to feel and be part of the most exciting learning community in Europe.” I told my students that if you want, we can setup a project and find partners for ourselves. Uponthis, my students said together, "WE WANT". We started thinking and researching what we could do. I told my students that in order to set up a project, we must first have a project idea and plan. We had a discussion with them about what they wanted to do a project on. My student Muhammet: “Teacher, we learn ironing in your lessons. Can we do something about it?" said. İbrahim is; “We can also do something about the cleaning,” he said. Mehmet said: "We must show that we do not need the help of others."

" Aslı said: “What would we do if we were alone on our own, it should be related to this”. Yavuz Selim, on the other hand; "I love to eat and I don't want to be hungry, let's talk about it," he said. Eren said, "Let my teacher be concerned with our needs." Very good project ideas came from my students. Considering all the ideas, we named the project as “I CAN MEET MY OWN NEEDS” so that it covers the skills for their own needs and created a draft plan. We planned that we can improve our plan with the people we will partner with, add or subtract. We were just getting started. We made a list of what to do. First of all, we had to find a foreign co-founder in order to establish a project. We uploaded our project idea anddraft plan to the ESEP platform and wrote a collaborative search text. We were not satisfied with this, we shared our project idea and our search for partners on social networks. Thanks to these sharings, we started our project with a total of 14 teachers, including a founding partner from Greece, 3 partners from the same school, and 10 partners from Turkey.

Melike BOZAK- Çamlık Special Education Vocational School/        DENİZLİ- TURKEY

I am Maria Kraniti, a Greek language teacher in ENEEGYLl Egaleo, a special vocational school in Athens, Greece. I have already participated in two Erasmus programs but I noticed that there are some students in my school who don't like to travel abroad but would like to communicate with foreign students. So I had the idea to search for a program that it would give them this opportunity. ETwinning was the best way to bring my students in contact with other students from different countries. At the beginning it wasn't easy to find a special vocational school to cooperate with. Fortunately, after doing some research on the social networks, I was happy that I discovered the announcement of our program. 

I got in contact with teacher Melike Bozak, she accepted me as a co-founder and also accepted my colleagues with happiness and generosity. She showed us a lot of things as we were beginners in this field. Afterwards, I informed our headmaster, the school board, the parents and the students of our decision to fulfil an eTwinning program. They all agreed that it would be a very fruitful experience for all of us. Our students were enthusiastic about the activities of the program and they were eager to do their tasks. They were all waiting for the time that they would communicate with their Turkish classmates.

My colleagues and I had a meeting with our students, we explained to them the aims of the program and we made a brainstorming game in order to see their expectations for the program. Moreover, we made a schedule and our students shared the tasks according to their preferences, as each student liked a different task. Mike and Andreas liked the  "cooking" task the most, Thanasis and Thanos the "ironing" and Aris and Giannis the "bed cleaning". They all had fun and our program was a really nice "trip" for all our school community!

I CAN MEET MY OWN NEEDS

I am Sevgi ERGAN, working as a special education teacher at Sivas Ahmet Kutsi Tecer Special Education School. We have done eTwinning projects with my students before. When my students said, "Let's do a project this year, too," I contacted Melike and I joined our project called I CAN MEET MY OWN NEEDS. My students had a lot of fun while making the logo and poster of our project. Ironing, cleaning, making beds, preparing fruit plates were very useful activities for us. As a collaborative effort, they were very excited to write the poem of our project and read it aloud. 

We had live interviews with friends from different cities and countries. Thanks to our project, we made many friends. My students say nice things about the project.

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            Sevgi ERGAN 

        Ahmet Kutsi Tecer 

Special Education Vocational School

My student Ibrahim says: I am ibrahim. I learned a lot from this project. Like making a bed, cleaning, ironing. I also made many friends from different cities and countries. We had live meetings with them. We wrote poems and stories together. It was a different experience for me. If there is another project, I would like to participate again.

My student Ebrar says: I'm Ebrar. I loved the project. Because I love making logos and banners on canva. Also, thanks to our project, I learned how to do many activities. Of these activities, I liked ironing the most. It was also very nice to prepare a fruit plate. We did a different activity every month. I was very curious about what my other friends were doing while we were doing the activity.

I am Katerina Tranou.

I am an IT teacher in a Special Vocational School

in Athens, Greece. It is the first time I participate in a eTwinning project. 

When I heard the title of the program from my colleague Maria Kraniti I understood that it would be very interesting because it responds to the needs of our students. 

As an IT teacher, I had the chance to show many things to my students with the WEB2 tools and they were enthusiastic when using them.

It was nice to see them trying to make the best logo or the best brochure and they had agony for the results. They were very interested in creating the material about the e-safety because we had long discussions about this topic. We had fun when we did the videos about  the housework and they understood that chores are not as easy as they imagined!

The funniest thing was the time that they had to sing their poem. It took us some time to convince them! 

Anyway, I have to admit that our experience through this program gave us the opportunity to get to know other schools,  new friends, students and other ideas and civilizations. 

I am Kleopatra Michaleli. 

I am a Greek language teacher in a Special Vocational School in Egaleo, western suburbs of Athens. I also teach household economy. So as you understand when my colleague Maria Kraniti told me that there is a Special Vocational School in Turkey that runs a program that has to do with my subject  of teaching I didn’t hesitate to participate in it. I saw the activities of the program, I discussed them with my students and I explained to them what we are going to do. 

It was very funny because all our students who were going to participate in the program are not used to helping their parents with the housework and they had difficulty in doing such things.

At last we had a great time in practicing all these activities. Also, I have to admit that I am not an expert in WEB2.00 tools and it was a great lesson for me to learn all these tools and now I am ready to use them again in my work and in future programs.

My students had different preferences in the program. There are those who liked most the IT activities, such as the creation of a logo or a brochure and others who liked most the poem or the housework activities. However, one is for sure! All the students liked the food preparation!

I hope I will have the chance to participate in future programs.

I am Mary Vasilopoulou. I am an English language teacher in Eneegyl Egaleo, a Special Vocational School in Athens the capital of Greece. It is my first year in this school so when my colleague Maria Kraniti asked me to participate in a eTwinning program I didn’t know the teachers and the students very well. 

Fortunately, the program started in March, so I had the chance to realize what the level of our students in English is and I could propose the students who would be more suitable for our program. I have to admit that our students had a distinctive improvement in the English language through our program, I will not hesitate to involve more and more students in future programs.