Hello Mariana and congratulations on your prize! How does it feel to be singled out by Teachtoday as "Teacher of the Month"?
To be perfectly honest, the news left me speechless for half an hour! Teaching has always been a passion for me and it’s wonderful to see that my students’ efforts and my own have been rewarded. This prize is great encouragement for us all and, of course, for my school, Nicola Vaptsarov Technical Vocational School in Radomir, Bulgaria. I am proud to say that it was the very first school to teach electrical engineering in the country!
What exactly is your background? What do you teach?
I’m actually an English teacher and I’ve been teaching English for 20 years. This year, my students are all 8th graders (14 year-olds). They are a great bunch of lovely and enthusiastic youths with sparks of curiosity in their eyes! I would like to take this opportunity to greet them all as well as my colleagues.
Can you explain how you became interested in eSafety in the first place?
I’ve always been interested in ICT and keen to explore ways of integrating these tools at school. I am also a big fan of the eTwinning platform and I use ICT a lot in my teaching. I send my students their homework by email, for instance, and they return their assignments in the same way. In addition, we often have online class meetings. eSafety emerged as a natural issue from those activities.
How did you involve your students in this eSafety project?
I started by setting up a team of internet safety volunteers among my 8th graders and we dedicated a special time every week to work on the project. It was their initiative to conduct a survey around the school on how their classmates use technology and to translate the results from English to Bulgarian. They then went on to share the eSafety PowerPoint presentation that we developed in our team with students from another vocational school. I think they did a fantastic job, especially considering that this was the first eSafety project conducted in our school.
Do you have any other plans to promote the responsible use of technologies in your school?
I can see that although the project is now over, the level of engagement remains high, both on the part of the students and of the school management, so we definitely want to keep going. We are now working on a movie but it’s top secret so I can’t tell you any more!