My non European colleagues, often ask me what eTwinning is all about!
Well….
eTwinning is a free online community for schools in Europe which allows you to find partners and collaborate on projects within a secure network and platform.
Through participating in eTwinning, your school will be able to:
- enrich learning and motivation of pupils (aged between 3 and 19) and staff
- access high quality professional development and ready-made resources
- raise standards across the whole school community
- gain recognition for your commitment through eTwinning awards and the International School Award.
- Search for an Erasmus+ partner to carry out projects with and apply for mobility funding.
There are, also, special quality labels, for students, teachers and schools!
Quality labels
1.National quality label
A National Quality Label is awarded to teachers with excellent eTwinning projects and indicate that the project has reached a certain level of quality in their country.
2. European quality label
The European Quality Label is a second mark of success and indicates that the project has reached a certain European standard.
3. eTwinning School label
In order to recognise the eTwinning work done at school level, there is now, a new label available – the eTwinning School Label.
The concept of recognition for work done in eTwinning has been in existence since the start with Quality Labels being available to teachers for their projects both at national and European level. However, these labels are applied only to the work of individual teachers in projects. In order to recognise the work done at school level, a new label is now available to apply for – the eTwinning School Label.
The principle behind this new label is that eTwinning wants to recognise and appraise the involvement, commitment, dedication not only of scattered eTwinners, but of teams of teachers and school leaders within the same school.
The concept of attaining the status of an eTwinning School is that of a developmental journey with components that can be objectively assessed. It is not a competition, but rather a progression from one level to the next.
A summary of our project, this year
Our project celebrates culture and happiness.
What the four partners ( Greece, UK, France and Poland) propose is that, students produce a presentation or “Culture and Smiles in a Box” on their partner country in groups, both in class and on twinspace Forums. To be able to do this, students gather information about their own country and life and send it to their partner schools, which are responsible for producing the presentation on their partner country’s cultural assets on twinspace Forums .
Students :
– Consider the definition of culture, and reflect on what this means to them
– Share relevant information about their lives with their European partners
– Create”Culture and Smiles in a Box” presentations
– Reflect on what they have learned about the other country and the differences and similarities between the two cultures
– Write reflective essays on what they have learned
Objectives
1) To help pupils to identify, explore, and become aware of European values.
2) To raise pupils’ awareness of what makes them happy and share this happiness with their peers in Europe.
3) To assist pupils to identify European linguistic diversity and become aware of the importance of learning European languages.
4) To develop pupils’ insight into the similarities and differences among nations.
Our project in detail
This #eTwForCulture project ,lasted the whole school year 2018-19.
There were tasks to be completed to share SMILES in many ways such as passing a ‘messages and our CULTURE in a box’ from one country to the other.
This is a project on happiness; it is about helping students find happiness and sharing it with others. It focused on ourselves, well-being, friendships and relationships. Children have truly enjoyed communicating and participating in a variety of tasks and realising that they have many things in common with their e-pals. Pupils have learnt about the culture of their e-pals / friends (tangible and intangible). It was definitely a project celebrating internationalism and individualism.
Depending on the activity, children had the opportunity to work independently, with talk partners both in class- in 2s, in small mixed ability groups or in whole class situations and on twinspace, using ICT for research or to communicate and present their ideas in different ways.
Pedagogical Innovation and Creativity
The overall aim was to realize that, happiness comes from within us but can be spread and shared with others!
Children reflected on themselves as individuals, identifying positive things about themselves, valuing their abilities, qualities, strengths and achievements as well as their mistakes, sharing and comparing them with their European peers, at the same time!
Children recognized that their culture affected themselves but also others; they thought of ways to make others smile, by means of intercultural projects !
Children considered their own and their partners’ feelings (empathy) and thought of appropriate strategies to cope with uncomfortable feelings as well as skills for solving problems and different ways of behaving to different types of intercultural relationships.
Children also focused on intercultural relationships and they explored the value of these relationships as well as their feelings within the context of important relationships, including family and friends of a different cultural background.
Children made each other smile through their dialogue, written work and through technology!
All in all:
Children felt able to be creative with their audience in the partner schools in mind and dare to share and compare.They also used their imagination and creativity as well as their artistic skills, in order to fill their CUbeS with content.
The learning from the project was so significant that it will not be lost from children’s minds
Our project, provided the opportunity to break down classroom walls. Happiness in learning, became a practical ,rather than theoretical, part of the curriculum.
Our work provided in the shared learning environment were a meaningful pathway, towards understanding the concept of feelings.
The true revelation has been that people in Europe are essentially very similar with shared values, cultures and interests. Surely, this helped us to overcome our prejudices and made us more open to intercultural cooperation.
Curricular integration
The work was mostly linked with the English, MFL, Topic and Computing objectives. To help partner schools to fulfill their statutory responsibility to support their cultural development and prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life. To use and combine a variety of software (including internet services) on a range of digital devices to design and create content that accomplish given goals, including collecting, analysing, evaluating and presenting data and information.
The theme was chosen deliberately to ensure that the project and its work was as cross-curricular as possible. The areas of ,EFL, social studies, expressive arts, citizenship,and basic IT , have all been integrated into the sharing of our common project activities .
The main focus was to improve the learning of English.
This fitted well into the Curriculum and all the pupils benefited.
OUR EUROPEAN COOKBOOK
We held a European Day of Languages to get the rest of the school know our European friends better. We also had etwinning school days, when our students presented their etwinning projects to the rest of the school.
A second focus was citizenship. By exchanging information about each other’s towns, lives and heritage, the pupils learned a great deal about each other’s environment, way of life and culture. Our coursebooks , are based on both cross curricular and cross cultural topics quite relevant to our Etwinning project theme!
I made sure that, ALL my 95 students, in different age and language level, took part in our etwinning project.
Communication and exchange between partner schools
We used a variety of ways to communicate with each other and as a group: the teacher bulletin in twinspace, a messenger group, email. Communication was regular and effective.
The tasks were mostly set by the coordinating schools in the United Kingdom and Greece but we were open to suggestions and ideas of the fellow teachers. The activities and work produced was shared in pages of twinspace by all schools and the work process was communicated using the journal. I coordinated the work but also set responsibilities and supported teachers in using a variety of ICT tools so that they successfully participate in the project.
From the beginning, there was a strong plan on twinspace Pages, which gave the teachers guidelines, responsibilities and timescale for each element of the project.
Students were encouraged to interact with their partners,and share their work on twinspace,both from the school ICT lab and from home. This all gave a real purpose and meaning to learning a foreign language.
Our students were able to share their feedback on our Twinspace “DiscussionsForums Threads” , on a regular basis . The pupils shared information and experiences, and thus learned from each other and strengthened their communication skills.
Collaboration between partner schools.
In collaboration ,we all decided on the range of topics that we would cover and the optimum time for posting/sending/receiving the correspondence items.
We tried together to do some pre-matching of pupils and classes , based on their known interests.
By all means we ‘recycled’ language that pupils have previously learnt in their English class .
We created a teachers’ e-mail exchange, too and a frequent collaboration on the Teachers’ bulletin.
We created our 6 CUbeS threads on Forums , which we often updated with the help of our students.
Teachers and children participated and collaborated in monthly activities such as: they uploaded posts in padlets, liked and commented on other posts, worked together to produce web presentations to introduce the schools , towns and countries ( taking-drawing pictures, writing the scripts and deciding on the school areas/town sights/country favourite places to present) and to share customs and traditions on collaborative web tools, they participated in a drawing logo competition and explained their reasons in a forum, expressed what they have learnt in forums, shared playtime games and healthy recipes, made, posted and received cards, little gifts and beautiful origami crafts , which made them smile, shared well being strategies. They have enjoyed their twinspace membership, participated in all the activities, emailed their e-pals and expressed their views in forums – and they even suggested their own questions to be added in the forums – and joined in live chats, supervised by teachers! Children have thoroughly enjoyed participating in the project and have majorly contributed to its success.
Use of technology
Children had the opportunity to use ICT to communicate and present findings in a variety of ways.
All children had Twinspace membership and emailed their epals; however, before using the email feature, we had lessons and discussions on the appropriate use of email, what information to include to be safe and respect each other while considering cultural differences. Children expressed their views in forums ,supervised by teachers!
The project linked with aims / objectives of the ICT / computing curriculum. Pupils were taught to select, use and combine a variety of software (including internet services) on a range of digital devices to design content that would accomplish given goals, including collecting, analysing, evaluating and presenting data and information. They created work for a specific audience making sure that the content would be interesting but at the same time reliable. Children were also taught how to use technology safely.
Specifically: I had small groups of my students,to use Photoshop to enhance and crop photos and then put them into Movie Maker to produce our videos and also had them create a Quiz on pages. We also used Movie Maker to make short videos, Padlet to work on collaboratively, and a Word Cloud Generator,for feedback. We also used other collaborative web tools such as: GoConqr for our mindmaps, Google Tool Builder for our virtual travel guides ,Thinglink for our interactive photos , Artsteps and Classtools.net for our 3D exhibitions,Canva and Linoit for our posters, Issuu for our Cookbooks.
Through eTwinning,my pupils learned to use ICT tools in a pedagogically meaningful way.
They wrote comments in the forums, chatted with real people, did interactive exercises, took and uploaded digital photos and videos, searched for information, etc. And all this took place in the pedagogical context of studying English communication.
Results, impact and documentation
This project, enthused and motivated the children. Children fully enjoyed and participated in the project. It enabled the pupils to use new technologies, to learn about the culture of their European friends (tangible and intangible) and experience through their communication how English is not only a school subject but an indispensable means of communication. Most importantly it extended their cultural awareness and knowledge, it enabled them to learn about, respect and celebrate similarities and differences among them, celebrate individualism and internationalism through fun activities and tasks. Children were HAPPY, shared and received HAPPINESS AND SMILES!
Here’s the link to : OUR EUROPEAN COOKBOOK
Children need to understand the diverse world they live in, respect values, different languages and faiths by working together and this is achieved through enhancing pupils understanding of their place in a culturally diverse society and by giving them opportunities to experience such diversity.
Our project, helped us to widen our horizons, reconsider our perspectives, improve self-esteem, increase understanding of different cultures and feelings , enhance tolerance and prove that “communication is at the basis of understanding”.
All in all, we achieved :
- to promote group activities for tolerance and cultural understanding;
- to strengthen my students’ intercultural competences in order to be ready for responsible understanding of Europe’s identity and common values;
- to develop the European dimension through arts education (origami crafts etc) and creativity with the aim to promote multiculturalism and tolerance between students;
- To develop “Out-of-the-box” activities that would encourage mutual support, team building and group cohesion ;
- Encourage personalized learning approaches by acquiring new artistic and pedagogical skills with the aim of developing new ideas and creativity of the students involved in the project.
ELT inspired 