Dossier

Interviews

Q: Dear Mrs Baricevic. We are students Nika and Anton. We read magazine Stage 5 and were amazed about its quality and interesting materials, and about good way of presentation. We read Stage 2, 3, 4 when you sent them to my teachers. And we read scanned pages from Stage 1. The project is amazing, so much work was done. We want to ask. How was the idea of Stage born? Why did you decide to start project, which is difficult as we understand it?

A : Thank you, very much, Nika and Anton, for your kind words about Stage. I'm really glad you like it. The idea of Stage was born 5 years ago, after my students had won the first place in the European competition in Portugal. They created a thematic newspaper for the 50th Anniversary of Shuman's Declaration. The paper was named "The Noon". The meeting of European Clubs from 27 countries was held in Lisbon. After that, our school magazine STAGE was born.

Q: How is the work on Stage realized? Who can offer materials and how they are selected?

A: The IGK Newspaper Project was started in the autumn of 2000 and is now in its sixth year of publication. The name of the newspaper is "STAGE". It was started because it was felt that there was a lack of extra-curricular activities available to gifted and talented students, particularly at classes 7 and 8.

The IGK school has a wide range of extra-curricular activities; from journalism, ICT, Globe project, Photo club and other activities, but none of these were particularly aimed at catering to the particular needs of the talented students who need to be challenged beyond the normal scope of most school activities. In particular, I felt that I could target students who were linguistically able to carry out such a demanding work as it is a magazine in English.
A school newspaper seemed to be the ideal forum for developing these talents. It helped raise the profile of English and the talented group within the school. There was no school newspaper in existence and the only precedent was "Mali Goran" (in Croatian) which has been published for years earlier. STAGE project represented a fresh start in a completely new area of school life.
One of the most attractive features of this particular project was how well suited it was to developing a whole host of English language learning aims and objectives. It could provide any student, and in particular talented students, with the chance to stretch and develop themselves in a meaningful way with visible and practical results.

In a broad sense this project could fulfil CNES (Croatian National Education Standard) aims for the school curriculum in the area of social and cultural development and prepare the pupils for the opportunities and responsibilities in their future education and life in general.
Materials can be offered by all students in school. They are informed how to do that. The editors and other members of STAGE team select the works according to particular topics.

Q: How did it become possible to start making international issues?

A: Thanks to ePALS (www. http://www.epals.com ) that is the Internet's largest community of collaborative classrooms engaged in cross-cultural exchanges, project sharing and language learning, the students from the elementary school "Ivan Goran Kovacic", Slavonski Brod , Croatia , got in touch with schools in some countries that were interested in collaboration on STAGE.

It all started in January 2004. The first message came from Ghana . After that a bunch of emails arrived from Australia , Japan , Poland , Italy , USA , New Zealand and Israel .

The teachers and pupils were interested to take part in STAGE. Soon, we realized that our publication would be the first international school magazine in English in Croatia .

We were honored to communicate with pupils and teachers and learned about the world. What an amazing experience!

All of them did an excellent job and sent us kind messages, exciting students' works, wonderful pictures, amazing videos, short and long letters; they informed us about their countries, schools, culture, tradition...

We had materials for fifty pages, but only 32 were available. What a pity! Can you imagine how hard it was to choose articles for the STAGE No.4? These precious treasures are still used in my regular English classes as the original learning resource.

And, this is not the end of the story! Some classes in IGK have started a long-term communication with schools and children from participating countries.

We invited the schools, classrooms and teachers around the world to partake in STAGE No.5 again. Children's' bright ideas and their fantastic imagination have been saved in our latest publication called STAGE!

Q: Why did you decide to create the electronic version? Was it to accompany and repeat the printed version or any other reasons?

A: I noticed that elementary school pupils used the computers at home and often at school mostly for educational and less educational games, even very violent games. Some of them were very talented in other ICT skills and I wanted to generate their enthusiasm for using computers as tools for learning English, research, organizing, writing and publishing, so I started a newspaper club with a group of seventh (13) to eighth (14) grade students. By inviting three or four students from every class, I insured that I would soon have "experts" for STAGE printed version which has been created in CorelDRAW 10 program.

In addition to creating a valuable school publication, STAGE project quietly accomplished many goals for creating the electronic version. The printed version consists of 32 pages and the materials we received from our partners couldn't be all published in one issue. That's why I decided to start the e-version although I was an "absolute beginner" in web designing.
Thanks to my STAGE partner from Novosibirsk , Russia , Milana Zubritskaya, who encouraged me and offered her help, we have the STAGE site at: www.stagesb.org

I have known Milana Zubritskaya in a variety of capacities for not a long time. She has been my ICT instructor for a year and a half. In addition, she is my precious friend and a partner in creating the STAGE web site where she is responsible for many important things in the web site content.
Milana is organized, efficient, extremely competent, and has an excellent rapport with me in spite of difference in ages. Her communication skills, both written and verbal, are excellent. Working together on the site, I have found a reliable and generous friend.
In summary, I can say that Milana has performed a high level of creativity, responsibility and special personality that is so important in common work.
STAGE site is growing all the time!