Saša Mezek, Osnovna šola Vide Pregarc, Ljubljana
Gifted students are the ones, which we have to allow their knowledge and skills developed outside of school. I myself have worked with the gifted students of the 5th and 6th grade. I placed my article to this thematic set, because I want to present how we can diversify learning outside the classroom, namely in an open learning environment. An open learning environment is a virtual classroom, created with Storybird. Storybird is a program in which we create a picture book. Students can simultaneously add pictures and write text. By creating a virtual classroom, I enabled a medium by which gifted students can express their creative writing and imagination. The program itself contains various ilustrations that can be taken by students as a basis for writing their stories. The key objectives that I wanted to achieve with the students are: • enhancing creativity; • promotion of the indepence and the freedom of choice of students; • improving the vocabulary; • improving the writing. Firstly, I registered into the program and examined it in detail. Then I created a virtual classroom for the students. During the lessons for gifted students I presented the online application for writing stories and explained the course of work. Each pupil was given an online password by which he could access this online application. All forms of use were presented to the students in detail and additionally we went through various forms of use of the application together. Students started practicing at school and continued their work at home. They were given a variety of tasks, which were the basis for writing stories. There are many advantages with this approach to work, namely: • high quality ilustrations that may help students in their writing; • working with the computer and the program; • entertainment and learning at the same time; • intrinsic motivation to learn; • learning Slovene and English simultaneously. However, I have also identified some disadvantages, namely: • lack of time (students have many other activities); • teacher is not able to promptly correct the text. To the students, this form of work represents a different way of writing stories due to use of information communication technology. This way, the students can work and learn in a manner that is nowadays more close and attractive to them. Students were able to read and compare each other stories and they also helped each other. Some of the stories were published and some students wrote merely for themselves. I provided feedback to the students through comments that are enabled in the application.
