eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 3 eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 3 | Page 42

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2013 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------eTwinning – A Breath of Fresh Motivation by Ghionul Gogoasa-Gelal How could I start sharing my eTwinning experience with you? Maybe I should start by saying that I have been part of the great eTwinning family since 2008, trying to have small projects, but the true success as far as team, project, experience and acknowledgements are concerned came in 2010 when I entered a great team and we started our first project called “Intercultural Dialogue Through Fairy Tales, Drama and Art”. There were 35 schools from 33 European countries involved in the project and it received The European Quality Label in 23 countries and the Mevlana Prize for Intercultural Understanding in 2013 at the Annual eTwinning Conference in Lisbon. And I also continued in 2012 and decided to take part in another project –“European Great Figures”about some of the national famous people of each participating country, in this case 22 countries (the same team). In each of the projects mentioned above we used drama, we performed dances, songs, traditions or presented famous people from the partners’ countries, all these activities helping the students have an intercultural dialogue. These are the students who participated in this awarded eTwinning project: In all these three projects so far all the partners worked together and created three books in English: Once upon a time in Europe – 35 fairy tales from 33 countries; European National Traditions – 28 national traditions; European Great Figures – 22 different national famous people. And we will not stop here, because next year we intend to start another project, with another very interesting intercultural subject and with a new boost to my own and my pupils’ motivation. All I can say is that my eTwinning experience has been a great journey that, luckily, has not ended! This project was the first source of motivation for me. I started seeing eTwinning projects from a very different perspective, motivation being the main thing that breathed new life into my teaching as well as into my students .Teachers constantly have to find ways to improve their teaching techniques, to come up with fresh ideas to motivate themselves but also to motivate their students to learn, in my case English. I discovered that this can be easily achieved through eTwinning projects. So I continued motivating myself by starting another project in 2011, with mostly the same members of the 2010 team, a project named “National Traditions, Songs and Dances”. There were 28 schools, each from a different European country, involved and, again, it received the European Quality Label in many of them. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 42