eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 2 eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 2 | Page 36

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2012 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I am sharing here my personal experience as a teacher trainer and local coordinator of two kinds of agencies involved in teacher development: a professional network of teachers and the local “branch” of a national association of Italian language teachers. Within the regular activity of these networks, it is possible to arrange an “Open Afternoon” in order to present the projects together with the process underlying the project itself. The activity would be particularly relevant to share all the steps teachers – and students – took in all the several stages of the decision-making process: the objectives, the contents selected for that project, the web tools explored, the relevance of the project to the whole class syllabus, the interdisciplinary dimension. Open days/afternoons or simply eTwinning sessions of this kind are not the same seminars given at national or regional level organized by the National Agencies with the aim of introducing eTwinning as one of the actions to promote common projects among European schools – it is something more. It is using an amount of relevant work carried out by some local classes in order to make materials, procedures, good practices and advice available to colleagues probably living and working next door, but who have not had the chance and/or the courage to take advantage of eTwinning. It is also a way to show other teachers working in schools similar to ours, and even teaching the same subjects and syllabus, that eTwinning can be included in our curriculum and exploit a particular aspect of our syllabus. This way it is really a bottom-up approach, which is flexible, democratic and does not require too much time