The goal is to find other schools in Europe to collaborate with. There are many ways to start a project and the only thing that stops you is the amount of time you want to spend on this project. The website is full of ideas and you can choose if you want to start from scratch or if you want some help from a kit. There are many kits for example: culture in a box, digital Fairytales and digital journeys.
Also you can choose to either start a project yourself (based on a kit or based on your own ideas) or you can join another project. You can also choose to work with only one school or many, with a lot of subjects or only one.
I have chosen to start a project based on a kit with only one other school. This is my first time creating a project with E-twinning and I taught it was a good idea with only one school. I send an invitation to a school in France who accepted. I and my college decide together which next step to take. The first one is to write a letter to each other with a presentation. The next one will be to present your hometown and your country in general. We are aiming at using more ICT along the project as power-point and photo-story etc.
If your project is accepted by E-twinning, the school is awarded the European Quality Label. If you want to you can further apply for the E-twinning prizes.
As many other sites or tools, E-twinning has advantages and disadvantages. The most important is that it gives a more natural input for the pupils. There are reel persons who read the letters, it isn’t only the teacher who does it to grade. You learn more about other countries and ICT in general.
The negative is that it isn’t the easiest page to get to know and it takes a lot of time which you might not have as a teacher. But with a lot of free help and guidance from Anders Brännström at E-twinning you can do it!
My advice is to start out small: join another project or start one yourself by taking a kit and inviting only one school. It’s a good idea to choose a country where the French, Spanish or English isn’t there mother tongue. In that case your pupils have the same knowledge of the target language and you can develop together.
Anneli Ritzén
It was interesting reading your opinion about E-twinning. I would like to start a project with my pupils but this year I don't teach English so I have to wait. I have visited the web page and I think like you that it seems to be a little bit difficult.
ReplyDeleteIt must be much easier to run an E-twinning project then to have a big EU-project. My school has taken part in a Comenius project and it was a lot of work with the report, specially the final report. When you take part in E-twinning you can choose to participate with your class, the entire school doesn't have to do it.
I think like you it is good if your partner school learn English too, because the students are more likely to be at the same level.
I'm looking forward to start my own E-twinning project. / Annelie Jakobsson
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ReplyDeletethis was very interesting to read about. but I also think that it take a lot of time. It´s fun that you can chosse country you want to have contact with. It iteresting for the pupils to meed other children in other countries
ReplyDeleteI really liked your presentation and I went to the site immediately to read more about E-twinning. And after looking at the site for just a short while I agree with you there are many things to do, it´s just the time that stops you!
ReplyDeleteI think the page was nice to look at, fairly easy to grasp and there were many fine ideas about how to use the page. I like the "Kit" because they had a hole planning with goals, process and evaluation. They seemed very detailed, elaborat and feasible. I found a kit called "Digital stories" that really pleased me and maybe I start that project in my class...
Your opinion to start with something small seem very vise. I think it´s easy to be too exalted in the beginning and start up something too big and in the end it can be really hard to finnish.
I wish you good luck with your project and I hope your pupils will increase their knowledge of English and also have a pleasent time while the project is running!
Maria Hägerström
Hi!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you! I think e- Twinning seams to be a brilliant way of making real tasks for the students. The good ting is that you can find a project that is already planed and use is as a whole or re- do the thoughts so it fits your purpose. I agree that the site isn’t the easiest to navigate on but with some training it will be possible. I think that we have to demand that we can use our planning days and our in-service training days to work with this kind of projects, it’s to important to let it pass just because of the time.