The Evaluation form - Czech republik meeting

UK - BELGIUM - CR

Evaluation Form

1. What did you like the most?

The school had a very warm and welcoming.  Very organised and prepared for our visit.  Dog therapy was an interesting experience and it was clear it had some benefits for the pupils which seemed to link into physio programmes. 

The tour of the school showed us the similarities and differences between our schools. 

The work stations for the ASD students and seeing the pupils use.

Enjoyed working with the staff and the students in their classroom

The children’s enthusiasm during the ceremony and the warm welcome.

The hospitality and the efforts from the teachers to make themselves clear all the time. The introduction to the Canis-therapy

The working with the I-Pad’s.

The characterplay in the class (teachers being autists)

The endgame with all the teachers

The well-organised and varied program.  The trip to Kutna Hora

Cycling to school was a very good idea and great fun.
The participants the most appreciated friendly atmosphere and opportunity to speak about the common themes of special education. We liked that the visitors interested in our work. Jindriska and Iva loved sport activities like bocca and kin-ball and they were glad that the visitors liked trip to Kutna Hora.

2. What can you use in your own school?

Displaying work on strings.  ASD workstations.  Ipads were a very important teaching tool in the Podebrady school and we saw students using a variety of ipad apps which will be useful for some of our students at Lakeside. Thanks to Lenka we now have an extensive list of recommended ipad apps!!

Working with autists : working according a taskplan, enhanced with images.

We could use that in our school too. Children would be helped with this plan.

The I-pads would be interesting to work with in our school. 

We are thinking about setting up a project and program to  introduce I-pads in the school. Physical handicapped children could have many benefits from the I-pad. Not only for learning but also as help in their daily life.

The sensory stories are very inspirate. Especially about Queen Elisabeth and her celebration. We definitely will try the similar stories.
We would like to use the sport activities which we saw. Our children love it very much.

3. What did you learn about stories and communication?

The use of IPads for stories and communication is interesting tool.  The Ipad books were also easy and quick to create. 

Communication is promoted throughout all activities in the Podebrady classrooms. Teachers were very sensitive to the needs of their students and work very herd to encourage and develop the communication skills of their students, using symbols  and ipad communication based apps to consolidate learning and understanding. There was a wide variety of story based activities evidenced in the school. The Dragon Story was very impressive and students hard worked very hard on this. 

Communication is cross-border, with word, sound, gestures, signs, expressions. 
We would to learn from our students about communication without the border :)

4. How could the visit be improved?

The visit was well planned and enabled us to get a good feel of the school.  Next time it may be beneficial to see a story/communication being taught in two different classes e.g. ASD and PMLD.  This will enable us to compare the similarities and differences between the schools.

More time to chat with the other teachers from the school to evaluate and plan future interschool and class to class projects.

More opportunities to work with staff in their classrooms to observe good practice and to interact with students.

It was a very well organized meeting so we don’t have any comment on that.
The meeting would be even more useful if they could remove the language barrier for all participants. We must to improve English!

5. What would you like to learn more about from Podebrady Special School?

The use of workstations in the classroom e.g. how long does the pupil work at the station and how much social time they have and are the results better when the pupils work at a station rather than in a group?  I would be interested to know how the school is planning to harness the educational opportunities facilitated by the internet. Are there interactive educational learning sites available in the Czech Republic?

We like to learn more about the school system, the class-system, evaluations, parental contacts,

Interesting pedagogical applications for the I-pad. 

A specific visit to a class with first-grade readers and more time to see the working with the I-pad’s.
We were glad, that all teachers are able to cooperate and to prepare interesting programme for our visitors.