eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 3 eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 3 | Page 18

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2013 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The students showed a video of the project which dealt with the main differences between Rome and Montagny Le Bretonneux (French partner) as far as the following topics were concerned: 1) Street Art; 2) School services; 3) Means of transport; 4) Gastronomic itineraries. All the topics were translated both into English and French. The students demonstrated the effectiveness of the project and asserted they managed to: 1) Implement their language knowledge 2) Implement their ICT capabilities 3) Learn about team work 4) Learn about working in groups 5) Enhance their self-esteem Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge by Ksenija Vidmar-Nicevic eTwinning – the Comunity for Schools in Europe serves as the safe, creative, collaborative platform for teachers to connect and share ideas not only in virtual way, but, gradually, it affects real movement of our students and their teachers in many ways. Not a long time ago, we, as teachers, used to motivate the pupils' hidden areas of affective life, including their very rich imagination by various techniques designed to foster up students' imaginative world using storytelling , drawings, video films e.c.t. Some 6 years ago EVERYTHING has changed! We, teachers, stopped being the only/main/central source in the process of making our students be creative and imaginative, cooperative and ready to discover new horizons. We GOT the eTwinning community! The students deeply impressed the Headmistress and the teachers as the boys and girls explicitly manifested their enthusiasm for eTwinning, a project they defined as the most adequate tool for a new way of teaching which allows them to reacquire the will to learn, making them understand the European dimension, thus increasing the awareness of being European citizen. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Students, at first, unsecure and not skillful either in using various tools and in using foreign language as their connection to European countries, but, at the same time, still unaware of their potentials that were patiently (or not?) waiting inside them-their perfect world of imagination that has been, somehow, neglected on their schooling path. eTwinning projects that were tackling all sorts of areas and topics, suddenly made the difference. Our students got born again some 5 years ago: fresh, almost untouched, in bloom imagination, helped by most creative ICT tools, allowed our students express themselves in many different ways. eTwinning has become their (and our, as well) favourite 'tool' to demonstrate themselves (ourselves) through slogans, acrostics, videos, comics, drawings, roleplays, music, interactive tools as Voicetread is, and so on. At first, these students of mine learned how to design PowerPoints, small videos, video presentations, quizzes. 'A living map of Europe' was our first eTwinning project in 2008. Croatia was not among the official countries, so I registered as a Slovenian teacher! What a joyful moment it was!Year by year, the tools we used started to grow together with more self-confident and enthusiastic attitude towards eTwinning Projects: all the students wanted to stay longer after school lessons every single day. We 18