Spring ICEPro Virtual, our 25-hour professional development course, starts on 3 March and runs for six weeks on Moodle and eTwinning. We have 26 practitioners enrolled (student teachers, teachers of English and teacher librarians) from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal. There are two courses running and the tutors are David Valente (Nord University,Norway) and Sandie Mourão (Nova University Lisbon, Portugal)

Spring ICEPro Virtual is our solution to a 25-hour ICEPro face-to-face course which was planned to run for a week in March 2021. It is one of the four Intellectual Outputs for the ICEPELL project. 

Our first two ICEKits are ready!

We are so excited about our ICEKits. These are teachers resource packs and one of the ICEPEL Intellectual Outputs.  ICEPELL will be developing 17 ICEKits, around 17 different picturebooks. The first two kits are pilot ICEKits and will be used during the virtual professional development course that starts on 3 March 2021. 

ICEKit #1: Perfectly Norman has been developed around the picturebook Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival (Bloomsbury, 2017)

ICEKit #2: Whoever you are has been developed around the picturebook Whoever you are by Mem Fox and Leslie Staubs  (Scholastic, 1997). 

We are really proud that Danuta Wojciechowska, a picturebook creator and illustrator/designer, has been responsible for the design of our ICEKits at Lupa Design.

On 4 February 2021 Sandie Mourão gave a presentation at the TEALS /CETAPS Advanced Research Seminar on the ICESurvey results for Portugal. 

On 8 January 2021 Silvana Rampone (USR Piemonte – Rete Sostenibilità, Italy) organised a local multiplier event with the support of LEND.

Sandie Mourão (CETAPS, Nova University Lisbon) gave a webinar about the ICEPELL project, disseminating some of the initial picturebook selections and the ICEPELL eTwinning activity cycle.  It was attended by just over 150 Italian teachers. 

18 – 19 January 2021: Our 3rd Transnational Meeting transformed into a Virtual Working Group Meeting to accommodate COVID19 restrictions. Organised by Carmen Becker and her team at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany we spent two days together working on three of our Intellectual Outputs:

• The ICEPro Course: Updates on progress
• The ICEkits: Sharing an almost-final-version of the designed ICEKit#1 Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival (Bloomsbury 2017)
• The ICESurvey: Presenting and comparing our results across the five countries; identifying the implications for our professional training course; and planning how to disseminate the results. 

It was a busy couple of days but it was great to be together and move the project forward. Things are really taking shape. 

A big thanks to Carmen and her team for making us so welcome and comfortable.