Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------BreizHessen in Europe
by Heidi Giese
Last summer my French friend Nadia, a teacher of
German language, spent a couple of days with me
and my family here in Germany. We naturally
talked about school – even on holiday... and we
quickly came to eTwinning, and a project idea was
born that summer! At the beginning of the new
school year we asked our pupils what they thought
about our ideas, and they were very enthusiastic
about what we had planned to do. They also
worked on the details of the topics we had planned
to deal with that year according to our curriculum,
and we finally set up our project in the second week
of school.
We prepared them with the vocabulary necessary to
fulfill the tasks to do, and the pupils went on their
way to know each other, then presented their
region, their school, their traditional feasts.
We also had some problems with the Internet, as in
the northwestern region of France last winter there
was a terrible storm destroying most of the coast
region and damaging connections in the central
region where our partner school is located. So we
could not skype for a while, they did not see our
products. But no problem, we solved that by
sending postcards for Christmas by “snail mail” –
they took some days but finally arrived. We also
exchanged little handmade gifts as paper stars for
windows, self-made cookies etc. Europe has
become little in distances.
As we wanted to improve our pupils’ speaking skills,
we prepared them for producing podcasts with
audioboo.com, a really simple way of putting
together photos with audio files. Another smart tool
they used was fotobabble.com, where my pupils
presented their village, their town and region.
Animoto.com was also used many times as Animoto
is really easy to use and helps with smart
outcomes, videos that look professionally made
with music given by Animoto and with that we had
no problems with copyright. A boy in my class of
French made about 10 videos, one after another in
a week or so and meanwhile improved his writing
skills in a foreign language, as French is for him, by
playing with the photos he took, rearranging them,
looking for a good music sample to insert and
creating wonderful short videos in French.
Our region in the north of Hessen has a partnership
with a region in France, the Bretagne. Several cities
are involved, some for more than 40 years. My
French teacher friend and I also know each other by
working in associations of these French-German socalled “jumelages”. So eTwinning continues in a
way with young people what our ancestors had
started in the early sixties of the last century.
Wonderful, right?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
97