Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2013 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------eTwinning as a Lifestyle
by Noemi Lusi
I was the very first Italian teacher to work on
eTwinning. When I did, the name of the project was
‘Twinning’ and it was an experimental action
promoted by EUN among National Spring Day
Pedagogical Advisors in January 2004. We were in
Berlin then and the European Schoolnet suggested
that in addition to our work, we would also
experiment on trying what was then called a
‘Twinning’ among nations. 2004 was a very
important year for the European Union and in Berlin
we were also planning a lot of celebrations in our
country for the 5th Enlargement which saw ten more
countries join our dream.
We did experiment and try, starting with two
‘twinnings’ per country. As the Italian
Representative for Italy I was attributed a
‘Twinning’ with Slovenia and a ‘Twinning with
Slovakia’. With the Slovenian and Slovakian
colleagues, we carefully thought about it, brought
our ideas back to our countries, kept
communicating online and together with our
students came to the decision that the title of the
eTwinning with Slovakia would be ‘Fountains of
Europe’ and the one with Slovenia would be ‘Recipe
Twinning’ (http://fountainsofeurope.tripod.com/ http://recipetwinning.tripod.com)
Day 2004 activities, ‘twinning’ was one of the most
interesting interactive ones, aiming at matching
schools in pairs to work together on a topic.
After the great success in our group, the ‘Twinning
project’ was evaluated by the EUN and officially
presented at the Launching Conference in Brussels
on January 15th, 2005 with the name of ‘eTwinning’.
Since then it has never stopped going. eTwinning
has become a way of teaching through ICT and the
teachers who use it as a powerful tool are also
experts in didactic innovation.
Since then every year thousands of schools ‘live’
eTwinning selecting a variety of subjects that
interest students motivating them to use both ICT
and English, Spanish, French and many other EU
languages as the vehicular means of interaction.
With Slovakia we thought that as photography is
one of the many ways we can capture and celebrate
life, through some precious photographs and short
texts, we would celebrate the ‘Twinning’ between
Italy and Slovakia privileging the theme of
"Fountains of Europe". We therefore also made a
sort of online album, assembling with our students
some original and authentic material, photographs
of our favourite national fountains taken by boys
and girls themselves. Italy and Slovenia,
instead, decided to cooperate in a recipe exchange
which implied many activities, including translating
and ‘baking’ work.
Great results were obtained and it was immediately
evident to all of us that among the many Spring
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