Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2012 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Now, I have 18 new running projects and 180
students are involved in them. In spite of some
challenges I confront due to external reasons,
which are really discouraging, I carry on my work
with my students incessantly. Of course there are
many factors that affect the visibility of a project
and the performance of an eTwinner, but the most
important one is the support that you get from your
NSS. If an eTwinner feels alone, no matter how
creative and skillful he or she is , they end up with
nothing.
‘A positive coordination among CSS + NSS +
ambassadors + eTwinner = projects of high
quality and visibility’
Whether the project that has just been closed has
been successful or not, it is important for both
teachers and students to carry out a way of making
it known and sharing it with other people involved
in the education sector. This group and the whole
eTwinning website have provided its members with
plenty of possibilities, and web tools, to promote
our projects online.
What I am going to illustrate here is however a
range of initiatives whose main aim is to encourage
teachers (both eTwinners and non-eTwinners,
students, teachers from other schools etc.) to be
informed about eTwinning and its overall activity.
The first step should involve our students – those
who took part in one (or more) eTwinning projects.
Students can become excellent ambassadors and
share their knowledge and experience with their
peers during one of the informal opportunities they
are offered at school. Or, as an alternative (and I
am referring here to the Italian secondary school
situation), they might allocate a “slot” during one of
the monthly School Assemblies institutionally
organized by each school for all students where
they could show their project and be ready to offer
assistance to others.
Not Only Virtual: Sharing Is the
Word
By Carla Tosoratti
Carla Tosoratti teaches English Language and
Literature at Liceo Scientifico "Duca degli Abruzzi"
in Gorizia, Italy. She is an eTwinning Ambassador
and has won a European Quality Label for her
project "Where did the Romans get to?". She is a
teacher trainer, and CLIL teacher trainer and
coordinator of a teacher network. She is a contract
lecturer at Trieste University. She loves her job,
and everything dealing with teacher training.
The process of everything concerning an eTwinning
project – from the very first contacts with the
future partner to a reciprocal evaluation of the
project’s strengths and weaknesses – requires time,
dedication and a lot of regular commitment for both
students and teachers involved in the project. What
often happens when the project is over is that
students need to concentrate on something else in
order to gather new energy, while teachers plunge
into either a new eTwinning project or continue with
their daily hectic activity.
What about the role of teachers? Well, apart from
the usual regular dissemination that goes on
informally with other teachers, one of the ideas
which could be relevant is setting up a kind of
network of schools which are already working with
eTwinning. The network could be either organized
“on its own”, hosting regular meetings, open to all
the schools of the area, or embedded into other
existing school networks or teachers’ associations
dealing with teacher training, European projects,
teacher development and so on.
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