eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 1 eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no.1 | Page 4

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2011 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------you can read more in the special section of the Newsletter entitled ‗Web 2.0 Compass Area‘. We have been having many irons in the fire this year, and I would like to thank everybody for their involvement and dedication – it has been an exciting year, and we look forward to the years to come and to the contributions old (by now) and new members can offer! THANK YOU! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For our next task, we brought to light the fact that one of the most important and most generous features of eTwinning concept is learning by means of cooperation. However, some uncertainties and questions had aroused recently, namely: are we in fact promoting cooperative learning in our activities, or just doing traditional group work thinking of it as cooperative learning? The challenge we brought up was to look again at the 9 characteristics of Cooperative Learning, and illustrate one of those features with practical examples, classroom situations, project phases or possible scenarios in different learning settings. A list of samples of good practice emerged – valuable models at our disposal to indeed turn Cooperative Learning into reality in our eTwinning projects! We are currently presenting our favourite eTwinning projects using Screenr in the eTwinning Vitrine. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ eTwinning Life By Maria Georgiadou Maria Georgiadou is a teacher of French at ΕΚΤΟ ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ in Rhodes, Greece and a Greek eTwinning ambassador. She is also the coordinator of the eTwinning Francophone Group. My first contact with eTwinning was in 2006, when a colleague of mine told me about it! All the time we have been reading the blog entries on the Homepage (and some of us have rated some of them) and voting up or down comments, we have commented on blog entries and comments in the group, we have stopped to read the Group Guidelines (from time to time), we have commented on the cartoons in the sub-group entitled ―Cartoon of the Month‖ and on the video clips in the sub-group entitled ―Video Clip of the Month‖. As I was really bored by the situation in the class, always repeating the same things, without having the impression of doing anything useful, I quickly subscribed and became an eTwinner, a very enthusiastic one! At first, we did not have the possibility to go deep inside in what eTwinning means, because my partner and I were very, very new! Our collaboration was mainly an exchange of sch