Author Archives: georginadimova

Avatar

About georginadimova

Gjorgjina Dimova is a Computer science teacher for 18 years in primary school “Strasho Pindjur” – Negotino, R. Macedonia. She’s National Geographic Certified teacher, etwinning ambassador, scientix ambassador, TeachSDGs ambassador, Edmodo ambassador, curriculum and British Council trainer for Critical Thinking and problem solving and using the microbit. Microsoft Innovative Educatior Expert for three years, Microsoft Trainer. She’s a curriculum trainer for the Bureau of Education in Macedonia. She has trained over 500 teachers for implementing activities for the subject “Working with computers and coding” .She has trained over 200 people in basic Software skills and coding as a trainer. She has also trained teachers for Formative assessment and Innovative use of ICT in education. Validated trainer for The British Council for “Critical Thinking and problem solving” for the 21Century schools project. She’s co-founder of the Center for Innovations and digital education DIG-ED – organization whose goals are to improve digital competencies for students and teachers by organizing activities with the schools and trainings for teachers. Chosen among 65 best teachers of Former Yugoslav Republic. E-Innovation winner 2018. Global Teacher Award 2019 winner

Water distribution on Earth

Posted on by

Through this activity, students will understand that the drinking water on Earth is in small amounts and not all countries have equal access to it. That is why we should save it. The activity was performed online through Microsoft Teams.

Objectives:

  • to get acquainted with the amount of drinking water on Earth
  • understand that we have so little amounts of drinking water
  • how polluted water comes to plants and other living things
  • to understand that not all people in the world have access to clean drinking water

Discussion with students: What do you think if there is a lot of water on Earth? How much water can we use for our own needs and for drinking? Does everyone in the world have the same access to clean drinking water? What about polluted water? How does it harm us?

Activity 1: In order for the students to understand how water is distributed on Earth, we organized the following small experiment.

Materials: 1000 ml measuring cylinder, pipette, 2 water containers, 1 glass of water, salt.

Procedure:

1. Take a container of water that collects 1000 ml and take a drop from it with a pipette and spray it. It represents water in the atmosphere.

A picture from the project practice– The picture is the author’s own –(Attribution CC-BY)
Continue reading →

Stay home and learn about bioeconomy

Posted on by

Author: Georgina Dimova

Date: 10 – 28 April 2020

Organized by: Markova Velika – chemistry teacher and Gjorgjina Dimova IT teacher in “Strasho Pindjur” school  – Negotino

Materials used: Computers, OneNote ClassNotebook, Padlet, Microsoft Teams, Kahoot, vinegar, organic waste (orange peels)

  • Can you teach science from home?
  • Can you make a scientific experiment with your students being at home?

Two teachers of chemistry and computer science subjects collaborated on creating a learning scenario “Don’t waste your waste” for the BLOOM bioeconomy project.

The learning scenario is part of the BLOOM School Box. Students aged 13 – 14 years old learnt about bioeconomy, how it can change our community and help saving the environment.

Online tools for collaboration

Continue reading →

Virtual Escape Room

Posted on by

Author: Georgina Dimova

Students active participation in the teaching and learning activities is imperative for achieving learning outcomes and acquiring long-lasting knowledge and skills. This is the reason why teachers are always trying to create different activities. They try to implement various teaching strategies in order to raise students’ interest and motivation to learn. This applies not only to classroom teaching, online teaching can be demanding too.

During Covid-19 outbreak many teachers are struggling to find the right way to teach online: to make their teaching interesting and engaging. At first it may seem to be very easy to involve students in online teaching activities since they are ‘digital natives’. They use technology on a regular basis and feel very comfortable ith it. This can be a huge benefit for students, but also a drawback concerning teaching. Sometimes students can find educational tools being boring. The challenge that teachers are facing is enormous. They should find appropriate tools for collaboratio, making the learning process interesting at the same time.

Escape Room as a teaching method

Escape Room is a new method that is finding its way into the classrooms, benefiting from the student’s involvement and their raised interest and motivation for solving given tasks. It was very challenging to use this approach without the possibility of physical involvement of the students. We used the digital version of an Escape Room in order to evaluate students’ knowledge in algorithms.

Continue reading →

Computer Science Week

Posted on by

Author: Georgina Dimova

Date: 10 – 14 February 2020

Organized by: Gjorgjina Dimova and Maja Videnovic
Primary schools: Strasho Pindjur  – Negotino and Krste Misirkov – Skopje

Materials used: Computers, Egg cartons, colored paper, worksheets, Power Point, Scratch, Kahoot, Excel, QR code reader.

More on: nedelanainformatikata.wordpress.com and dig-ed.org.

Computer Science Week is an event organized in primary schools to:

  • increase students’ interest in studying Computer Science and coding,
  • improve their knowledge in coding,
  • involve younger students into coding through playful unplugged activities,
  • teach students how to stay safe online and be good online friend.

The idea for the event has arised from our belief that every student can learn computer science with carefully chosen and interesting activities, that can raise its interest and motivation.

As the idea of Escape Room has been very popular lately among the students, it was really provoking to try to find a way to use it in educational way. The Educational Escape Room was designed as an experience in which students had to solve a combination of puzzles in a limited amount of time in order to win in the game. The puzzles of the escape room were arranged as a treasure hunt – each puzzle unlocked the next one. The designed educational escape room combined computer-based and physical puzzles, in order to create a highly engaging activity without compromising its educational value. Puzzles consisted of information from Computer Science but also encouraged improving students’ knowledge and skills through teamwork, communication, collaboration, and learning from each other.

Continue reading →