The Final Report (Turkish Team)

The teacher’s name: MUTLU HASPOLAT The Project’s name: “ANCIENT ROME IN YOUR MODERN TOWN” The School’s name: BURDUR MERKEZ TİCARET MESLEK LİSESİ Please visit our Project Blog to know more about our Project: http://ancientromeinyourmoderntown.blogspot.com Our twinspace: http://new-twinspace.etwinning.net/web/p62023  SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT “Ancient Rome in Your Modern Town” project is created to give young people the opportunity to learn history and culture of a great civilization. The Romans managed to survive for hundreds of years in Europe and in the other parts of the world by producing new technology and equipments on several areas. Romans created new management systems, using the magical word of "Republicanism", having the great art works, monuments or artifacts, tiles and buildings. The cultural history of Roman Empire is aimed to be taught to the pupils in an enjoyable way through the concept of “Ancient Rome in Your Town”. This project aims to encourage students to produce new ideas, to develop new points of view about history and culture while making a historical research, to be aware of the historical and cultural richness of their landscape and country, to notice how important the monuments and ruins are in this modern age. The learners/researchers are expected to acquire that to preserve the historical heritage means to preserve their future. During the project process, the students are aimed to take the shots from the right angles. It is also expected that the richness of Roman Culture and Civilization is brought back to life by the project participants.  RATIONALE: Burdur Ticaret Meslek Lisesi (The Turkish Vocational High School of Trade) is located in a region called “The Land of Lakes” where the history goes back to the Neolithic Age as the archaeological excavations and research have identified the remains of a great Roman civilization. In spite of this historical and natural richness, unfortunately, tourism industry is not one of the remarkable sources of income and the local people still suffer from unemployment due to the lack of entrepreneurship, investments and job opportunities in the area. It is inevitable to make a project on Roman culture, which is supposed to guide the parents, students and community in/around the city and raise awareness about the significance of the rich Roman Towns and its probable contribution to local tourism and considerable income. WHAT WE AIMED: By the help of this project, we aimed at raising students who have international good human relations and communication skills, organizational abilities, critical and creative thinking methods, the ability of goal setting and decision-making, and a great sense of responsibility for the historical heritage, as they are supposed to be potential tourism employers or employees of the future. It is an important goal for us to provide our students having successful careers on tourism since our region is an ideal place for this industry with its Ancient Roman historical wonders. And this project was only a tiny part of this process. WHAT WAS OUR RESPONSIBILITY? As the coordinator of the project, we were responsible of founding the e-twinning project team in our school, setting up the project blog, disseminating the project materials on web and upgrading it, creating a logo, maintaining constant and reliable communication and keeping the channels open with the partners, exchanging experiences, disseminating the results in our own region by the help of the local press, local TV and our web site, making sure our partners follow and obey the schedule. What was our approach and what we did during the project?: Teams were formed to perform various activities planned in the project. In the first phase, The e-twinning school team of teachers and students were set up and they were responsible for searching and preparing materials about Ancient Rome. For a better understanding the conditions of landmarks were explored. Some PowerPoint presentations were prepared about the Roman towns in our region. Some texts about local wonders were translated into English. Students took photographs on the theme “the buried history of my land and its' waiting to be discovered”. There were workshops for language lessons on basic words, phrases of the Latin Language by collaborating with the Spanish teacher Marta Pena (She teaches Latin and Greek in her school). In Turkey we have Latin Classes only in University departments like Archeology or the Faculties of Medicine etc. We are the first Vocational High school who had weekly Latin Classes in all around Turkey. We are proud of that and we could manage it by the help of our Spanish Partner School. Marta is a Latin and Greek teacher so she prepared and sent the Latin language notes to us every month. She also sent us the recordings to teach us how to pronounce the words. As a teacher of English I even didn't know a word in Latin. However, I studied and learnt the subjects and tried to teach my own e-twinners at my school. And I felt great when my students greeted each other in Latin in their everyday life.  A calendar full of our activities and Ancient Roman landmarks was prepared and printed to be distributed to the partner school by Marta Spanish group as well. We had a school trip to Sagalassos and Cremnia (Two ancient Roman Towns in the borders of our town) to explore those landmarks and collect data for our twin-space and twin-blog of the project. We had another journey to a different Ancient Roman Town called Kibyra. We were guided by an experienced archeologist named Sağdıç Arabacı. The students took photos and recorded his information on the video and prepared some documents to share with the other countries. We celebrated the new year in a very colorful way. We sent real postcards to each country and they all sent postcards to us and to each other as well. The most enjoyable part was our Ancient Roman cooking workshop. We searched for the Ancient Roman Meal recipes on the net and translated them into Turkish. To show a respect to the Ancient Romans, Marta and his students translated the recipes into Latin. We had big cards which involved Ancient Roman recipes and the students cooked by following the cards and tasted the meals at the end. The feeling that they had was interesting because they said “it was as if they had been back to history of these lands” We also visited the Local Museum and collected data and share with the other countries about Romans’ statues, daily items and medical tools. We all got surprised with the things that Ancient Romans used at once. According to our project schedule, we had another activity and it was building Ancient Roman buildings like theaters, villas etc. The Spanish group sent us some model books and the students created beautiful roman structures with them. We built a roman town in our e-twinning project corner in our school. We prepared a final project quiz and disseminated the results in Facebook, blogspot and twinspace. The teacher from different countries wrote their ideas on the blog and twin-space about making an e-twinning project with different countries. The other countries also shared lots of things with us. They can be evaluated in our e-twinning project blog. http://ancientromeinyourmoderntown.blogspot.com HOW WE TOOK USING THE ADVANTAGES OF ICT? Ticaret Meslek Lisesi (Turkish School) has an ICT department. The students learned to use flickr, glogster, storybird met the Google documents for the first time. They also learned how to prepare Power point Presentations and upload them in the twin-space. They learned to take good pictures and to record with video cameras from the right angels. HOW WE INTEGRATED THE PROJECT INTO THE ONGOING ACTIVITIES AND CURRICULUM: The topic of the project was integrated into the educational content of Geography, History and Foreign Language, Latin and Classical Languages, Biology and Environmental protection, Information technologies. Students developed their communication in a foreign language, in both oral and written form, to interact with partners. They learned to express themselves and interact by using ICT, apart from using them to find and organize information from ICT. Social and civic competencies, which refer to personal, interpersonal and intercultural behavior, were developed by joining other people to who live in other countries in order to make a project together. They were taught, individually or in teams, to update those essential competencies they couldn’t acquire due to being early school dropouts or people from difficult home environments. The project was also integrated into the subjects of Management, Accounting and Finance to calculate the risks of starting a historical tourism business in a specific area. They, now, have better managerial skills especially on historical tourism. HOW WE DISSEMINATED OUR PROJECT: The local newspaper visited our school in our activities while we were cooking Ancient Roman Food and they published the news both on their internet site and printed newspaper. Our Project was also subject to the Spanish School Magazine and there was a fool page of news about our activities and outcomes. We shared our works and outcomes on Facebook and BlogSpot. We also introduced our project in 2011 Antalya e-twinning seminar and in 2012 Berlin e-twinning seminar. In Romania our project was the subject of a school spring celebration. We also contacted with some parents and local organizations to finance the school trips, printed t-shirts, Roman food Cooking workshop and making Roman model houses. The all learned about our intentions and works so they shared what we do in their Facebook accounts and daily lives. WHAT ARE THE INNOVATIONS AND FIRSTS ABOUT THIS PROJECT? The project was so successful that it has some innovations: 1. The first e-twinning school team in our city. 2. The first Weekly Latin Language workshop was held in a high school in Turkey 3. The first Ancient Roman cooking activity was organized. 4. The people had a better chance to know the Ancient Roman culture which generally forms the Modern European culture. 5. The local people became aware of the treasure that they lived on. 6. An ancient Roman town brought back into life by models. WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM THIS PROJECT? 1. Anyone who wonders about ancient roman culture 2. Anyone who wants to see fantastic pictures about different countries with their historical landmarks. 3. Anyone who isn’t aware of the importance of historical tourism. 4. Anyone who wants to learn the basic usage of Latin Language. 5. Anyone who wants to cook and taste Ancient Roman meals. 6. Anyone who wants to know more about Bulgaria, Spain, Romania and Turkey. 7. Anyone who wants to get inspired by the beneficiate of making an e-twinning project as e-twinning projects motivated the students to come to school and study their lessons more. 8. Anyone who is looking for a good country/city to spend their summer holidays this year. 9. Anyone who wants to learn about different cultures and different societies.