Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2013 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------named “ So eco green” and several study visits
organized by Cedefop, in which we have recently
taken part. The students involved in Comenius
mobility witnessed their experiences around Europe
and highlighted the benefits they received from
cooperation and contacts with colleagues from
other countries; shortly after the foreign students
on their international mobility to our school focused
on the importance of intercultural exchanges.
The meeting was an opportunity to introduce the
Etwinning community and I introduced Etwinning
portal and briefly showed how the platform works;
here I stressed the importance of virtual
cooperation in this particular historical period
marked by lack of funding and resources for
schools. My colleagues showed great interest in
professional development and training through the
learning labs and we discussed the role of IT in the
management of Etwinning projects. The presence of
an Etwinning ambassador in our school has been
perceived as a resource to foster digital literacy,
language skills and cultural exchange which
integrates collaborative European projects in
curricular work. The teachers of other subjects in
fact consider their poor knowledge of a foreign
language the biggest obstacle to access European
projects, so we offered to serve as language tutors
or assistants to facilitate their approach to
Etwinning. To serve this purpose, next autumn we
intend to organize workshops targeted to my
colleagues and to the teachers of the surrounding
area, and we foresee the cooperation of more
expert ambassadors to train on the platform and to
manage TwinSpace. Another very important aspect
which arose during the meeting is the possible
integration between Comenius and Etwinning, in
fact we intend to exploit the contacts we made to
plan and carry out proj ects which involve different
subjects, with the support of the language teachers.
After the meeting in my school the interest for
eTwinning has gradually increased and so far we
have joined three new eTwinning projects which
will be developed next school year, the first one is
about Cinema and adolescence, the second one is
about celebrating the day of languages in all
European countries next September, 26th , on the
day dedicated to languages, and the third one,
maybe the most challenging of all, deals with the
issue of flipped classrooms.
The second part of our “Europe Day” was devoted
to a conference on the theme of the origins of the
European Union, held by a former teacher of our
school, Professor Carlo Corsetti. He illustrated how
the concept of human rights has developed in the
course of the centuries and how human rights are
the basis on which European Union was founded.
Terms like equality and parity have been fully
talked out, with reference to philosophers and
historians of Ancient Greece. By going through the
main steps of this journey towards democracy and
union, he highlighted the importance of Franklin
Delano Roosvelt’s “Four freedoms speech”,
delivered in 1941 and introduced the fathers of
European Union, among them, Altiero Spinelli,
who, after the Second World War, influenced the
European integration with his commitment and
ideas. Several rare documents were presented and
the main articles of the Universal convention of
human rights were read and commented.
A flash mob video with an orchestra playing “Ode to
Joy” closed our celebrations!
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