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Ľudmila Šupáková,
Primary and Nursery School
Bzince pod Javorinou
A participant of international eTwinning seminars in Freiburg in 2013 and Olomouc in 2013
17
I teach mother tongue – the Slovak language, German as a foreign language and civics at a small rural school.
I have participated in an eTwinning seminar, a continuing education course and e-learning course, where I learned and build upon basic information about the program and where I gained basic skills in using the TwinSpace. I have attended two international eTwinning seminars, one in the Czech Republic and one in Germany. All of the above has significantly influenced my work as a teacher. I have gained a lot ideas on how to present to pupils the learning content of my subjects in a non-traditional way, how to motivate them to work and learn, and show them the importance of learning foreign languages. I have met many European teachers and our informal conversations gave me an opportunity to compare educational systems, teacher’s working conditions, and methods and forms of their delivering of educational content to pupils. I was very impressed by the spontaneous, informal and sincere approach of many colleagues from different countries as well as their openness and tolerance. I benefited from communicating in a foreign language and working with ICTs and last but not least I had an opportunity to see towns I had not visited before.
Working on projects helped me assure myself that evaluating pupils based on their test results, term papers and oral examinations is not as important as assessing their ability to solve problems and practically employ their knowledge as well as their enthusiasm and participation. The latter is something that my pupils displayed abundantly when working on their projects, especially those marked by active collaboration on the part of our partners. I was nicely surprised and happy to see them enthusiastically create and prepare tasks for the partners, carry our assignments from our partners, read texts in a foreign language and compose their own poems. Most interesting of all was to watch my pupils plan and devise scripts and scenes when preparing videos for partners, in which they presented themselves, their school, town and work. My pupils and their foreign peers became really good friends and they are in touch with each other also via social networks.
My pupils showed the highest level of eagerness and joy when we connected with the partner school through Skype and they got their hands on our collaborative collection of their own literary works. Our greatest wish these days is to meet our new friends in person and currently we are trying to figure out how to do it.
At the same I am trying to get other colleagues in school involved in eTwinning projects and I have already had my first success, because I coupled up with a colleague and together involving pupils of different ages we started working on a single project. We aim to utilize creativity of the younger pupils and an ability of the older pupils to communicate in a foreign language. The project originated at one of the eTwinning seminars and I believe we will bring it to a successful end.
Following our eTwinning experience, our school has got involved in Erasmus+ and the project was a success.