I know it is so late to give this title but I was so bussy for the last couple of days. Before departing for Poland we had chosen the best logo in our school prepared by our students in order to use for all the project works.Actually the logo chosen in Turkey locates several objectives from the Project theme which is mainly about internet around the world and its effectiveness on the families. It mostly focusses on the safe internet usage and by using a mouse tool, the logo shows the importance of the clicks about the World and people living on it. That's the circle represents the planet earth. In my opinion the epicenter point of the logo is the hands which works as a security guard. The hands mean the project itself.
We have applied two different questionaries to the target students, app. 400 students, about the partner countries and Internet Usage in order to see what to do and how to do to be successful in expressing project aims and educating students and the community about internet and Europe in general. We are going to apply the same questionaries at the end of scheduled year (2015 June) in order to see how much we manage. We have prepared a statistics and a report so that we will be able to share our results with our partner schools during our trip to Poland at the end of October. To give a brief information about the results, I can say that the students know little about Europe although they are all familiar with internet technology. This shows that the situation is not that clean-cut. They use internet improperly and they waste their time in front of a virtual World. They are not aware of the real benefits of internet since they are mostly interested in spontaneous chattings and nonsense and harmful online games. Just few use internet as a tool to improve their knowledge and enlarge their Culture of anything valuable they are interested in. 
We have started Comenius Project Activities by establishing a project corner in order to use continiously throughout the project. We have put handy information for the people who knows little about the project. We also aim to exhibit our activity reports there on the project corner. Students were so excited working on it and they were all willing. I have bought some stationary to use to create some materials for the Project Corner and the students have produced the flags, posters and some news papers in order to settle on the project board. I have appointed some students to monitor and supply the persistance of the Corner.
The title in my blog may be interesting. Nowadays, after Gangnam Style, there is a wind of Harlem Shake. People mostly don't understand the real effect of the music and its strange and unnecessary looking dance. If we detailly analyze the starting point and the developing part of the dance, we can make healthy inferences about it. There is a person wearing a strange clothe and a halmet or a cone on his head. He starts dancing alone but the other people around acts as if he is not there. They go on working, studying or doing their routines. Suddenly, with the change of music, everybody starts dancing wearing strange clothes and doing different moves and actions. There is of course a philosophical explanation of this situation. The guy dancing alone represents the inner world of people which is completely mad; opposite of social behavior. People watching the first part with the solo dancer become confused since the guy doesn't behave normal. Then they become a part of the dance by the second part and they show their inner world with all its nakedness. Thus, Harlem Shake attracts the attention of most people no matter they like or hate it. 
Education is a tripod with school, student and parent. If the situation of one's absence, education becomes meaningless since the tripod lose the ability of standing. In Turkey, especially during the last decade, teachers have been continiously kept under pressure, checked and complained about by the school administrations, parents and communities' gossip mechanism. There are request boxes for the students in order to watch and learn about their requests and complains about their teachers but sometimes some students may write defamations just because they don't like the teachers or they are away from the lessons and rules. 
Of course the critiques and complains are constructive if they are real but on the other hand, in the situation of false directions, they are so harmful and destructive for the mental and social position of teachers. If there is failure in reaching the goals and targets, teachers are the direct collocuters and responsible individuals; not students or parents. That's, it is a hard job to teach and pay attention at the same time. Theachers are the scapegoats.
I have written an essay on belonging and identity for teenagers and I decided to
broadcast my work here in my blog. I am waiting for the comments
about. Enjoy....
There is another way
to use music as a source of belonging. One can play or sing alone and this
probably help develop identity. Some people feel more confident and satisfied if
they introduce their music by themselves. That is, some people are
inter-personal and some are intra-personal. 
Recently educators have been complaining about the students' indifference on the school subjects and increasing number of bad habits among them. Even today we have talked about our students' bad behaviours in and out classroom and we have made some decision to overcome these issues. Students have been acting more disrespectively to their instructors and parents than the last decades. This situation results in lack of academic education environment. If we want to deal with the issue, the first thing we have to do is to form a road map which includes a variety of approaching methods. I will try to offer some that I think it works when applied efficiently at school and at home. 
If we number them, we can put continious technological improvements as the main guilty. I will tell you about other issues in my future posts. Actually, technology is for people's comfort but when used improperly, it becomes an evil ready to terminate our social life as much as inner world. Teenagers and adults have been using internet and social media in most of their times. They share, express themselves and even have fun online. Cellphones, Iphones and others are their new and close friends. As they are very young, they aren't experienced and equipped with sufficient knowledge about the real life surprises. They think that online life is different from real life. That is normally so but when you start living online, you lose your values about real social life since you spend most of your times with your virtual friends instead of real ones around. Teens act quite free and they gather false information; that's why they become overloaded with useless, meaningless, impolite and rubbish ingredients. When they are offline, they go on behaving the same as online. The problem arupts then.
In Turkey, English has been taught as a foreign language since the beginning of Turkish Republic. In spide of this long teaching period, Turkish students have difficulty in learning English Language at school. They can not understand while listening to someone; they can not speak in target language fluently and; they can not write even a sentence even after a long learning period. What is the real problem they face while learning English?
In Turkey, this question has two different answers in general. There may be some people who thinks that talking about this subject is nonsense since there are more important questions around. Nevertheless, if one thinks twice, he/she can find it very prior to mind at least people's point of views. At the first look, it may be a very simple issue what pupils wear at schools. On the other hand, this is really important in terms of teachers and students. In this point, people think completely different as if they are divided into two parts with a knife. One group say that clothing style helps children express their identity and find a place in a group in the society. Another group advocate the idea that uniform is a must at schools since it is the real instrument which supply students with a sense of belonging and discipline.  |
As Hanım Ömer Çağıran Middle School, we organized a preliminary meeting in our school for our future Comenius Project; "My Digital Friends". Although I send all our partners an invitation for the meeting, except Eve Vunk from Estonia, no others could participate because they couldn't get grant from their National Agencies. That's why, we have conducted the meetings of the project with our Estonian partner. We have asked for our partners' ideas on developing the project application via email. We have had a busy week full of brain storming. Our councelor, Mrs. Azime Ünal; ICT teacher, Mrs. Melike Nar; English Teacher, Esra Süoğlu and our officer, Mr. Adnan Öztürk were very helpful during the meeting. Our manager Mr. Osman Nuri Batmaz was there whenever we need. He did his best to make the project application successful. Mrs. Eve Vunk was prepared and equipped with full of formative ideas. We couldn't manage the whole program because of the bad weather condition during the week but it was a victorious meeting since we filled in the common areas of the application form with very quality content. 
