eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 1 eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no.1 | Page 27

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2011 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Getting Involved in eTwinning By Inge De Cleyn Inge De Cleyn is the coordinator of vocational training at Sint-Janshof De Ranken vzw in Mechelen, Belgium and a Belgian eTwinning ambassador. I have been a member of eTwinning only since 2008. I had some students at our special needs school that studied an extra year and I wanted to give them something special, something they never did during their studies. Our students have no language lessons and they really are interested in English lessons, so I thought it was a good idea to do something with that. And eTwinning was the perfect method for it. Finding a partner was not easy, and it took a long time before we really started, but once the project was launched we had a lot of fun. We took a lot of pictures and we worked with very easy English sentences and Google translate. I discovered that a lot of my students had more knowledge about the English language than I thought. They learned a lot of words from TV. My first project was very short and I learned a lot about expectations, deadlines and more of that, but it was a great experience. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Starting an eTwinning Project By Paulino Tamayo Paulino Tamayo is a teacher of English, Science and Art at Colegio Puente III in El Astillero, Spain, responsible for young learners’ classes and materials development, and in charge of a number of eTwinning projects in his school, helped by colleagues. To me, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and related multimedia applications are a wonder of the age we live in. They have brought about dramatic changes in the ways we think, learn, communicate, access information and use our leisure time in unprecedented ways and at an unparalleled pace. This visually sophisticated world of colourful images, sound and animation at only a few clicks away attracts pupils like a powerful magnet, and can frequently succeed in engaging and motivating them where other traditional media, such as books, may fai