Presentation of Collaborative Creative Writing assignments [PBworks,

1. Collaborative Creative
Writing
Erasmus+ “Travelling words”
2014-2016

2. In order to make our students aware how
languages diversify over time and influence others
by loanwords, in order to increase their motivation
and to involve them to the use of ICT, we decided
to use a commercial real-time collaborative editing
system [https://www.pbworks.com] to
promote collaboration and distance learning.
We have firstly created a workspace for
teachers [travellingwords.pbworks.com] in order
to make teachers familiar with the system and set
also the guidelines for the students’ workspace. 13
teachers of all 4 schools were active in the
workspace, 3 teachers of the Greek school as
Administrators and 10 of the other schools at the
beginning as writers.

3. The aims of the project were a) to prepare students for
future collaborative working and b) to prepare materials [art
and drama project] in order to present them at the end of
the school year [graduation ceremony] celebrating the
opportunity we had to work with teachers, students and
parents of other countries.
The coordinators of each school selected names and e-mail
addresses of the students and informed them about
PBworks. Internal projects [i.e.
travellingwordsgreece1.pbworks.com] have been also
scheduled in order to make the students familiar with the
system.
The Greek coordinator has created a workspace
[travellingwords2015collaborativewriting.pbworks.com] and
added coordinators and teachers of all 4 schools as
Administrators this time, so that they could add their
students and follow their activities in detail. In this
workspace 8 teachers and 44 students were active.

4. 4-teams [blue – green – orange – red] were created
and each coordinator oversaw one team but also
“followed” and “advised” the other colleagues
concerning his mother tongue and possible
“improvements” including loanwords or reborrowing
words.
Each team has included 4 writing groups on the
topics: food – music – school – sport. Each writing
group consisted of 4 students [one from Bulgaria, one
from Greece, one from Romania and one from Turkey].
The students have been working on writing projects and
shared them. The members of each writing group could
read and critique one another in a supportive way.
The writing samples have been short, depending on the
subject.

5. Writing group: music
We have decided to celebrate the “birthday” of
our project. We have worked together with
students of the four participating schools using
the system PBworks, searching for videos of the
song “Happy birthday” in all four languages,
listening to the songs, adding the texts and
following along by reading the words. We have
sung it and we have created posters using the
web 2.0 tool http://www.postermywall.com.

7. Writing group: sport
One of the most interesting topics for our students is
sport. Therefore our students have been asked to find
common words on the topic and share them with the
students of all four schools using the system PBworks.
squash, skiing, sailing, polo, rugby, tennis, lacrosse,
sport, paragliding, Olympics, racquet, athletics, yacht,
goal… were some of the common words they have found.
Afterwards our students had to write dialogues or short
texts and create a poster using the web 2.0 tool
http://www.postermywall.com.

9. Writing group: food
What are the most useful words when you are travelling? Some of us think
of “water” and “food”. Therefore our students have been asked to write
their favorite dishes in the PBworks, to translate them into the 5 languages
[the common language is the English one, as it is a great help in their try to
read all the alphabets of the 4 countries].
Then they had to write a dialogue imaging that they were in a restaurant in
London and they couldn’t speak English. Unfortunately the waiter couldn’t
speak their mother tongue either. So in their try to make them understood
and order a dish they had to use a loanword from English or at least a word
which sounds similar to an English word. They could choose words from the
previous exercise such as … tuna, iceberg, ketchup, spaghetti, hamburger,
ravioli, salad etc. These dialogues have been presented in the graduation
ceremony in each of the 4 schools.
The third assignment for our students was the creation of a comic-strip
using the web 2.0 tool http://www.storyboardthat.com. They had to use
the dialogues of the previous assignment.

11. Writing group: school
Our last topic couldn’t be something other than “school” of
course.
Our students have been asked to write words on the topic
and translate them into the 5 languages.
Then they had to write a dialogue using some of these
words [ie. Math, geometry, physics, chemistry, biology,
sociology, sports, music, schoolbag, professor]
The third assignment for our students was the creation of a
comic-strip using the web 2.0 tool
http://www.storyboardthat.com. They had to use the
dialogues of the previous assignment.