Our Spring ICEPro Virtual Course, a 25-hour professional development course, was piloted between 8 and 28 March 2021 on Moodle and 7 and 20 April 2021 on eTwinning. Virtual adaptations due to the Pandemic.
24 practitioners attended the course: 12 teachers from Italy and Portugal and 12 student teachers from Germany and the Netherlands. Six ICEKits were created around six different picturebooks. These will be tried out in class over the next couple of months or in the 2021/2022 academic year.
The picturebooks that were selected by the course participants to create their ICEKits were:
- Strictly no elephants by Lisa Mantchev and Taeeun Yoo (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
- The Suitcase by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros (Nosy Crow, 2019)
- Here we are by Oliver Jeffers (Harper Collins Children’s Books, 2017)
- Cyril and the lonely cloud by Tim Hopgood (Oxford University Press, 2020)
- How to be a Lion by Ed Vere (Puffin Books, 2018)
- The Day the War Came by Nicola Davies and Rebecca Cobb (Walker Books, 2019
Feedback on the course content was excellent, but working virtually rather than face-to-face meant that our interactive and collaborative activities took far longer to complete. Also, as participants were working full-time as well as taking the course, they found it extremely demanding. Much of the time this was during lockdown with schools closed and virtual teaching and or studying taking place. Nevertheless, all practitioners did extremely well to complete the proposed activities and create their ICEKits. The ICEPELL consortium is extremely grateful for their perseverance and enthusiasm.