Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------HealthyANDhappy (hAh)
The first one was an eTwinning/Erasmus Plus
project. As you know, an active life style and
healthy food habits are very important in childhood,
and there is strong evidence that maintaining an
active lifestyle and healthy food habits provide
important physical and mental health benefits.
Nevertheless, Europe has been suffering from
sedentary life, unhealthy food habits and
overweight problems in childhood recently. As a
result of the overuse of technology, sedentary life
and unhealthy food habits, some kind of illness
appear in the body. In this project, we aimed at
increasing activity, improving dietary quality, and
decreasing inactivity during childhood. We als o
aimed at improving communication skills and ICT
skills for both pupils and teachers, improving
language skills for both pupils and teachers and
finding out new opportunities for the school and
wider community in order to increase pupil
engagement and motivation, to challenge pupils to
do more and to make learning ‘real’. During the
project, we really did lots of activities with my
partners. As an example, for making a project film,
we collaborated with film expert Mr Nikos
Theodosakis to direct and manage us. We also
collaborated with universities, and they supported
our project by giving seminars about healthy life.
Mom and Me
The second project was about celebrating mother’s
day in Europe. The project’s main aim was to
increase the awareness of mother’s day all over
Europe. We also aimed at cooperating and sharing
cultural similarities and differences, and we tried to
learn some basic sentences in each other’s
languages. Therefore, the schools involved tried to
instil in their pupils a love for learning, developed
their creativity by using ICT tools and fostered
them to take part in cultural activities. In addition
to this, our goal was to build strong relationships
between people from different countries, schools
and cities that will not be finished with the end of
the project. At the end of the project, we celebrated
mom’s day using google hangouts connection.
Ideas for Teaching English
And the last project was created for Azerian,
Turkish and Romanian teachers who want to
improve their English speaking and communication
skills and who want to join eTwinning but had no
idea how to work in the TwinSpace collaboratively.
This project consisted of 20 Azerian, Romanian and
Turkish teacher trainers (who were all experienced
eTwinners) and nearly 40 Azerian and Turkish
school teachers. It was a short project but we had
success at the end. We tried to teach them the
basic language through useful grammatical links,
games, videos, songs and ICT tools. We used social
media for teaching English and utilised the
TwinSpace as a learning environment. We also used
lots of ITC tools such as vocaroo, voki, google docs,
popplet, little bird tales, photostory, iwishyouto
while teaching. At the end of the project, we
created an evaluation form using Padlet to get the
participant teachers’ opinions. I think this project is
a good example of teaching a foreign language by
using ICT tools as project activities, by using social
media as a communication and collaboration tool
and by using the TwinSpace as a learning
environment.
Whenever I think about my background, eTwinning
was the ideal starting point for my personal and
professional development. Thanks to eTwinning
projects, Teachers’ Rooms, Learning Events,
conferences, workshops and seminars, I had the
opportunity to catch a new way of teaching, to
improve my personal and professional development
and I had the chance to meet lots of new friends
and colleagues from all over Europe.
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