Jana Jamrišková,
Primary School
Slovenská Ľupča
Apart from developing language and communication skills in pupils, eTwinning projects contribute to positive development of relationships among pupils in class, between teachers and pupils, among teachers and last but not least between school and pupils’ parents.
In all projects, in which I and my pupils have been involved, the pupils worked in groups, whether mixed international teams or groups within the class. They helped each other with their tasks in order to maximize the quality of their performance and a healthy rivalry existed among the teams. Friendships among pupils strengthened and pupils were proud of their achievements. Project tasks were set in such manner, so as to enable every individual experience the feeling of success and not feel demotivated.
Your pupils need not excel or perform above average in foreign languages for you to be able to carry out a high-quality eTwinning project. In my opinion peers in schools abroad have a level of knowledge comparable with our pupils and even average pupils in our classes can keep pace with them. Furthermore, eTwinning projects increase pupils’ motivation to participate in classes and to learn in general, which positively influences their academic results.
A finalist in European eTwinning prizes 2013, a articipant of the annual eTwinning conference in Berlin, 2012
Classes devoted to project activities are marked by a different atmosphere than regular foreign language classes, because pupils show interest in what is to be dealt with in class in advance; they look forward to it but at the same time feel responsible for their work results.
Last but not least this enthusiasm is fuelled by the high level of ICT usage. Young generation starts to be fed up by the usual computer or tablet activities, such as surfing on the internet, creating presentations or text documents or connecting via Skype. Fortunately, there is abundance of applications and mini applications created to be used particularly in foreign language teaching. Such apps allow for, for example, non-traditional arrangement of photos in photo albums, which offers the possibility of adding comments or soundtrack (for instance Photopeach), work with audio material and recording of pupils’ testimonies (for example Voki, Vocaroo), production of short videos, etc. And I cannot stress enough, how happy pupils get when they find out that they are sometimes more skilled in this area than the teachers.
Implementing an eTwinning project at upper-primary level one cannot omit the intercurricular approach. In the projects I have been involved in so far, foreign language classes have been most frequently combined with the subject content of informatics, art and science classes. One of the projects, Climb the Hill with CLIL, focused directly on CLIL method and we tackled the topics of natural water circle, solubility of substances, volcanic activity or the Solar system. My non-language teaching colleagues gladly participated in the activities and even today reminisce about the project, which brought innovative methods in their teaching.
The pupils informed also their parents about their eTwinning activities, as they performed some of the activities at home and because the non-traditional project activities, virtual meetings and talks with peers abroad and small presents from partner pupils provided a relevant answer to the question “What did you do in school?” Each project encompassed a presentation of the project to parents and their attendance at each of them always exceeded their attendance at regular teacher-parent meetings. Feedback from parents has always been positive, because they were glad to see that it was a way for their children to develop abilities and skills necessary for real life after leaving school, namely communication skills in a foreign language, team work and presentation skills. Publishing project results on the school web site or in local press significantly improves school’s public status.
In conclusion, there are no direct or indirect project participants, who would not benefit from eTwinning.
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Niet teda priamych či nepriamych účastníkov projektu, ktorí by z eTwinningu neprofitovali.
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