Since I have known eTwinning I have become a different secondary school teacher. In the beginning there was just my effort that I put in to meet the headmaster’s request: “I will be glad, if you get the project started in this school”. After three years of successful projects and my early experiences as a regional eTwinning ambassador, besides enthusiasm, it is also about a sense of “fulfilment” in my carrier as a teacher. Before “the eTwinning years” I was always involved in mobile projects and I got an internship abroad, however, I had never found so much positive influence on both pupils and teachers as in eTwinning. In the first year I chose a group of hard-working pupils and we created work teams with one coordinator to work on a project involving 3 subjects: German language, informatics and administration with correspondence. The pupils proved to work totally independently outside their German language classes and the less advanced ones got rid of their fear of communication, when they had seen that Nicolas from Greece or Agniezska from Poland also made mistakes in their writing. Besides the joy from learning we enthused ourselves about a beautiful poster we had created and we all watched in amazement Timea, who said to have embedded a mini video in the poster. Also everyone’s foreign language performance improved. However, what surprised me the most were our friendly relationships.
Simona and Dajana became the project “leaders” enjoying the natural respect from all of their classmates. They would address me in the school hallways or come to my office just to inform me about any news in eTwinning. We encouraged one another when something did not work, we collaboratively came up with new things and we organized an eTwinning “Senior day”. It was attended by former teachers, retirees and Petra assumed the role of the host and was surprised how well she had managed.
In the following years I discovered more positive impact of eTwinning. Some seventeen year old students, who had an absolutely negative attitude to learning German, but who were regularly involved in learning via the project, ended up screaming with happiness, jumping around full of joy, when we had received gifts as part of a reward for our creativity. At the same time they were very surprised that their “compulsory work” was rated so high. As far as creativity is concerned, the leader was Janka, who had no problem communicating in German and who discovered her “new talent”, the ICT tools. She became a “teacher” to all her classmates and enjoyed searching for new presentation tools. When working with computers we could often hear the following type of conversation: “Janka, I can’t get that Prezi to work. What’s wrong with it?” “Get Tomas help you, he also knows Prezi.” “No, he isn’t so good at it.” That was when I realised that nowadays girls are often more advanced in using technologies then boys, as that was already another group of pupils that proved this through their behaviour.
1. Prize in National eTwinning
prizes – secondary schools category
An eTwinning ambassador
4
Extra/ordinary
eTwinning stories