Poland Day 2

Monday, October 18, 2010We left our hostel at 9:45 local time (3:45 AM there) and went to a section of Adam Mickiewicz University on the edge of town. It was -1 Celcius when we set out. COLD. The University is divided up by disciplines. The main campus is for education, general studies, languages, etc. The section we went to is several miles away, and is for students of physics, chemistry, political science, math, technology, etc. All UAM campuses have over 40,000 students total. The science and math campus we visited today has over 5000 students just in these disciplines. It's amazing. We are here to share with the University and 4 area schools the an online portal called Teleplace and ways we can use it to partner with Poland. So, at the UAM campus, we set up computers with the program, set up the classrooms at we'll be doing workshops in later this week and met with some doctoral students.

After lunch with the group, we rode the train back to the main campus and had a meeting with the University Vice Rector. This is the 2nd in charge of the University from what I gathered, (like a vice chancellor in the US???). He had several questions about how App State does online courses, how students react differently in virtual worlds, and is really interested in creating a process for blended learning here in Poland (blended being part face to face and part online class). We will present Teleplace tomorrow to the doctoral staff and show them how they can use the virtual world to foster collaboration between students and for students to use it as a way to build shared understandings. I'll be briefly sharing the process of PLCs as a means to helping all participants grow. The meeting with the Vice Rector was great. He meets with the national Minister of Education and seemed to be inclined to advocate for Poland to migrate into virtual opportunities. After this meeting we visited the Polish countryside and had a perogi (sp?) dinner. Very neat. When we returned to the dorm, we planned our sessions for tomorrow's meetings with the staff. We just finished (10:45 pm local time). It's been a long day. Later this week we work with 4 K-12 schools- meeting the teachers and students. We plan to select specific partner teachers to be collaborative partners with specific teachers from NCCS, Watauga County Schools and Davie County Schools. We are also doing a conference on Friday and Saturday. My session is on PLCs for K-12. I've come to appreciate the challenges and cultural differences here. However, I've seen little to no diversity and I've yet to see a single person anywhere that's the least bit overweight. Must be the diet. Every meal we get seems to come with potatoes, meat, and either slaw, cabbage, beets or shredded carrots. The teacher who took us downtown last night asked about a teacher exchange for the USA. It would be great if we were ever able to do a one year or one semester teacher exchange. I could see these teachers being great teaching English as a Second language in US schools. Something to think about. To see various short video clips I've taken so far, visit my youtube page at http://www.youtube.com/user/dasme23 I've added about 10 short clips. They aren't long, because I wasn't sure how long they could be for youtube. I'll do longer ones later this week. I hope all is well. Off to bed... it's closing in on midnight here.