Are they really doing anything?

Recently, over the last few weeks, I have found myself asking if my students are actually doing anything. When I talk to them about the project, the different parts of it, what the other countries are doing etc. It seems to me that most of the things I tell them about come as news to them. This is obviously not what should be happening.

I have tried, more than a couple of times already, to get a list of the people with whom they are corresponding. This has been an unqualified failure and to be honest I should have chased it more. I don't know if they are exchanging mails with anyone. Some of them surely do as they ask me about the parts of the mails they have received that they don't understand, others though have as much said to me that they don't write to anyone. In the same vein I received a mail from Nikos, from Greece, that told me he would be sending out a list of the spanish students his students are writing to and would I please check this is the case. I feel he is suffering from the same worry as me. The said mail never arrived either.

Much of the recent work we have done has been relatively easy for the students. The Word Bank has only involved them participating in its recording. The processing of the videos, titles and credits, I have all done myself. The only thing they have had to do themselves has been the creation of a blog and the making of a diary, ok admittedly potentially quite a lot of work. But looking at what has actually been done, they haven't exactly knocked themselves out!

I commented on this with Dominika and she said she had similar fears, but I suspect that she has them for longer each week and also in class and is able to keep tabs on them much more than me. I am going to bring it up in Greece and certainly for future projects I feel that the main weight of the work ought to be on the students not so much on me.

Perhaps the first step in the project could be in the creation of a blog and then the students could add to it, doing things that are progressively more and more complicated and then in the end they would have a "result", a product that would be a history of all the work they had done and could even be avaluated.

Not easy, but something needs to be done I think.