Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2012 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------International Projects as a Way for
Promoting e-Safety
By Lidija Kralj
public exposure of their private data, photos or
videos, and how to be respectful towards others in
an online environment.
Lidija Kralj is a Croatian teacher of Mathematics and
Informatics at Veliki Bukovec Primary School, and
also a leader for national campaign "Safer Internet
for children and youth".
Teachers and students are using more and more
web 2.0 tools, work with different cloud resources
and social networks. Do they pay enough attention
to safety of online environment and make balance
between usability and possible risks?
If we look at eTwinning and TwinSpace from that
perspective, I am happy to say that eTwinning
projects are great way of engaging students with
online communication and collaboration in a safe
environment and guaranteed good company. The
TwinSpace has elements of social network but does
not put our students in dangerous situations.
Math empowered with e-safety
Last year, French math teacher Maryse Duprey and
I started a project "Architecture of My City" about
architecture, from a geometric point of view. Our
students (14 and 15 year olds) worked in pairs on
different mathematical tasks connected with project
idea and embraced mathematical language in
English, French and Croatian. This project gave
students the opportunity to see the mathematical
aspect of everyday situations and share their
knowledge with peers from another country.
Alongside with our primary mathematical goals, we
realized internet safety aims, as TwinSpace gave us
excellent opportunity to communicate and
collaborate in a safe online environment and to
teach our students how to use the Internet in a
safe, responsible and effective manner.
Students worked on tasks in the computer lab,
mathematical classroom, outside and at home.
They solved tasks making drawings, descriptions,
videos, taking photos and collaboratively working
on blogs and documents in TwinSpace. Students
use TwinSpace tools for communication,
collaboration and sharing of their findings.
We used chat for discussing their solutions and
differences among some mathematical approaches,
and videoconferences in which we shared our
experiences about project, discussed social
networks, their potential benefits-pitfalls and learn
some French and Croatian phrases.
So we employed the opportunity of using
TwinSpace as social network to show our students
what can be shared online, how to pay attention to
Teachers and e-safety
School policies about use of computers, mobile
devices, Internet and social media are still rare to
find in most of the EU schools. For example, not
one school in Croatia has it. At the same time we
are all exposed to social media influence and we
cannot just make up rules as we come across some
misuse. It is time t