eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 3 eTwinning Visibility Newsletter no. 3 | Page 66

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2013 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A Magic Touch… by Figen Oguzmert How I involved the students? The pace of change in education is accelerating day by day. Since our students are digital natives, it is inevitable for a teacher to keep her style of teaching up to date. As I believe in the effectiveness of using technology in class, eTwinning helped me a lot to improve myself personally and professionally with my students. “Education is not filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” W. B. Yeats. My eTwinning journey started in 2010. It really lit a fire in our minds. For us eTwinning is a window opening and connecting our classes to the world Why I wanted to involve my school in eTwinning? My school is a vocational and technical school so the interest of students for the English classes was at the minimum level. The approach of the school for language teaching was classical. I thought my school and my students needed a change and a new perspective for our language classes. Our first project was like a magic touch to my lessons. I was so curious to learn everything about eTwinning! I contacted our NSS to ask some questions I had had in mind and I learnt that our first project was a success and I was invited for the National eTwinning annual meeting to make a presentation about it - it was chosen one of the best examples. I believe in the benefits of the technology but my school was so poorly equipped in means of technology so it seemed to be a challenge at first sight. Involving the students was not very easy in my case because one of the challenges was not having a wireless connection at school, and in class we di @