| 1997 | 
Our story is closely connected with the enthusiasm, energy and creativity of our head teacher. He could not stand the sluggishness and the apathy and in 1997 he started a private language school and called it Academica. The school offered language and computer courses to local people, from young learners to adults.
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| September 1998 | 
September 15th 1998. An interview on the local TV station, where he declared that new teaching methods would be applied at the new language school from the very beginning.
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| 1998 | Pictures from the first room where multimedia was used to teach English. The teacher used a computer and the presentations were shown on a big TV. The students used earphones with microphones. The cables were attached to the ceiling. It was useful but the room looked very unusual.
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| October 1998 | Later on in October 1998 a multimedia language center was created in a public secondary school. At first there was only one computer and a TV, but soon each student was provided with a PC. 
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| 1998 | There was a big Christmas party for our students and their parents and Father Christmas gave out presents to our pupils. (Click on a picture to enlarge.)
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| 1999 |
In 1999 our students participated in a Global Network Class - a project supported by NEC Corporation of Japan with 142 schools from 41 countries. The name of the virtual class was Gakkos, which means 'school' in Japanese. The result of the project was a poster painted by the worldwide renowned artist of the sea Christian Riese Lassen, entitled 'Now and Forever'. The poster had the inscription:
Nelly from Bulgaria sent the following message "By preserving nature, we preserve ourselves." I believe that Nelly is right. I have received many messages from all over the world offering concerns and hope for our earth. Nelly's message is reflected in the title of our artwork, "Now and Forever." Through this project, I hope that the message of our artwork will open a place in the hearts of people throughout the world and continue to be a reminder of the care we must show for the preservation of our earth's resources.The rightmost picture here shows the final artwork elaborated with the help of participating schools and Mr Lassen. Now NEC Global Network Class can be reached here. (Click on a picture to enlarge.) 
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| May 1999 |
We celebrated the end of the school year together with the parents of our pupils. The happening was honoured by the head of the local education authority and representatives from the municipality. On a big video screen we demonstrated the language and computer skills of our students and modern teaching methods by multimedia.
The students demonstrated their computer and English language skills on the video screen. 
On the stage there was a contest for the pupils and their parents and the children sang action songs. We rearranged all songs, and recorded new playbacks. The new versions were more appealing to the children as they sounded with a pronounced beat and up-tempo. Click here to download Hockey Cockey on video as it was performed then. (28 MB mpg file). Click here to download the OUP version (416 KB mp3 file). 
At the end the head of the LEA congratulated the audience and our head teacher gave a speech. 
The excellent students received certificates of achievement and presents from the school. 
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| August 1999 | In August 1999 we attended the Seventh European LOGO Conference, which was held in Sofia. That is where we heard about Constructivism from a world's foremost representative of the theory: Dr. Seymour Papert of MIT. The original website of EUROLOGO '99 can be found here. (Click on a picture to enlarge.)
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| 2000 |
From 2000 to 2002 we made an electronic testing program, introduced it at Academica school and used it for in-service English lessons at a local pharmaceutical company with about 30 adult students at various levels. The students did the progress tests on a regular basis on their computers at work. The program sent all tests to our office where they were checked, and the results were automatically returned by e-mail. The messages contained the corrected tests and provided detailed explanations of the errors and the problem areas. It also gave test statistics in numbers and percentage. Later this system was used for language auditing purposes.
The testing application was supplemented with a computer literacy test, which was applied at another school where Academica gave computer literacy lessons to secondary students. After the final test the system provided important statistical results for the management staff of the hosting school. 
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| 2000 |
Alongside with his obligations our head teacher participated in a project of the British Council Sofia for the establishment of the Bulgarian Association for Quality Language Services. Academica School is one of the eleven founder members of the Association. Click here for evidence. We also made the first official web site of the Association.
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| November 2001 |
He also attended courses for inspectors of languages schools organized by the British Council Sofia. In November 2001 Academica became the second accredited private language school in the country. The school was inspected within an ELTeCS project "Quality Assurance Across the Borders" by inspectors from the neighbouring countries. The picture on the right shows the official presenting of certificates to the first accredited schools in November 2001 (click on a picture to enlarge). The event was honoured by:
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| 2002 |
In 2002 and 2003 he participated in a Leonardo da Vinci project for language auditors delivered by Dr Cor Koster, Director of Studies of the Language Center at the Free University of Amsterdam, Holland. Click here to see the website of the project.
(Click on a picture to enlarge.)
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| 2003 ver 1.0 |
Since September 2002 we have been developing the new electronic teaching system for e-classrooms at schools. The idea was to update Academica School with new means of instruction and to satisfy the need of our students for modern and attractive teaching. The system performs all financial and administrative tasks at the school and aids the academic management. All teaching and testing is done on computer. Version 1.0 was adopted in October 2003 and we upgraded it during the summer of 2004. |
| 2004 ver 2.0 |
The pictures here show Version 2.0 of the e-classroom during the Christmas holidays in 2004. We are presently working on Version 3.0, which has major improvements in the hardware, software, interface, improved internal coherence, and of course plenty of new study materials for language teaching.
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