THE H. C. ANDERSEN FAIRY TALE PROJECT

Marianne Frederiksen

The H.C. Andersen Fairy Tale Project is an electronic communication project between Slovenian and Danish pupils with basis in the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. The participants are classes from Slovenia and Denmark, pupils from 10 to 15 years - and three Kindergartens.

The basic common reference for the children is three multi-lingual CD-ROM’s about the life of H.C. Andersen and 5 of his most known Fairy Tales, in pictures, sound, text and animation, edited by Orfeus.

The overall idea is to inspire the pupils to be creative and produce new fairy tales in text, illustration and sound. Simultaneously most of the pupils’ products are published on a common project web-site: www.orfeus.dk/hca Very early it was decided to make this web-site public so that others pupils, classes and teachers could follow the process.

Here you can also find other project resources like links to web pages about Slovenia, Denmark, H.C. Andersen, Kid Link etc.

Besides presentations of themselves and their classes the pupils have made common Relay Stories, they write their own New Fairy Tales, they illustrate their partner school’s Fairy Tales, and they made Quizzes with reference to the CD-ROM’s.

We asked a Danish author to write the first chapters of the Relay Stories, and afterwards they are continued by different classes in Slovenia and Denmark.

The Danish Ministry of Education has given both the Slovenian and the Danish pupils possibility to communicate via the Danish National First Class School (Sector) Net.

The teachers and the pupils communicate in English through to closed electronic conferences: The HCA Planning and the HCA Fairy Tale. The teachers in the Kindergarten are in specially in charge of theirs pupil’s contributions.

Besides there is a third closed conference for the two Danish and the one Slovenian co-ordinator.

The project takes place in January, February March and April 1999.

In the workshop in the MIRK 99 conference we will – in words and using the Internet and the CD-ROM’s - tell and show you more about the planning, the process and the products of the project – as well as we will evaluate the whole project in order to inspire other teachers to a lot of similar trans-cultural electronic communication projects between pupils from different countries.

Danish project co-ordinator

Marianne Frederiksen, cand. ped, Project Manager at Orfeus

Orfeus (The Organisation for the Promotion of Educational Software for Schools), Gĺseagervej 12, 8250 Egaa, Denmark. Tel: (+ 45) 86 22 99 55. Fax: (+ 45) 86 22 99 56. E-mail: orfeus@orfeus.dk Web-site: http://www.orfeus.dk

Address in Copenhagen: Lćssřesgade 24, 2, 2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark. Tel: (+ 45) 35 24 99 98. Mobile: (+ 45) 21 67 25 28). E-mail: marianne@orfeus.dk