Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Being in the Fast Track with eTwinning
by Andrea Ullrich
This school year has mostly seen me in the fast
lane, powered by eTwinning - some really good
projects and two fantastic Learning Events made
we work close to my limits but also provided me
with the energy to do so.
At first I would like to thank the teams of “Across
the miles we meet”, “Be smart, don’t start” and
“Europe’s Sweet Tooth” for their great
collaboration, but this article will mostly be about
another project, a project carried out with Anna
Tobiacelli, a long-term partner and friend and some
volunteer students who could also be called longterm project partners.
The idea of the project was born when I visited
Anna in Warsaw last summer.
The moment we saw a pedestrian crossing looking
like a keyboard we started outlining projects – just
for fun – and two weeks later “Music Reflections –
Our Meeting with Chopin and Bach” was born. First
we just thought of a typical eTwinning project,
using TwinSpace and so on, but as Zespół Szkół
Ogólnokształcących Nr 1 Społecznego Towarzystwa
Oświatowego, Warszawa has the nice tradition to
organize an exchange every year, we soon agreed
on adding an exchange. Usually we do not have
exchanges with partners whose language we do not
teach, but the headteacher at my school supported
us, convinced by the visibility quality label projects
provide our school with.
At the beginning we just had them work in their
national teams, providing the partners with
information on the respective composer and
locations. In November we started the real
collaborative stage of the project - with our advent
calendar and some prizes to be won. Each student
and teacher provided at least one slide, and every
day we got to know something new about each
other and the role music plays in our lives. The last
window contained a puzzle that led you in three
steps to the URL of the voting tool.
After teachers had matched students for the
exchange, we launched another introduction; but
this time it was “Introduce your partner with the
help of a cartoon”, which really made them talk to
each other. By then we had moved to a closed
Facebook group as uploading, commenting and
‘liking’ photos was a lot easier there, and some
students had experienced problems when trying to
log in to TwinSpace. To cut it short, May finally saw
us united, first in the streets of Warsaw and
Gdansk, then in Thuringia.
What great learning experiences! Reading about a
place where a composer was born or visiting it with
your peers are two very different ways of learning.
We arranged similar activities in both countries,
visited museums, had guided tours with students as
guides, workshops, bilateral teams… this list is long
so please check our diary here:
http://twinblog.etwinning.net/65629/.
Needless to say that some of my colleagues
objected that idea, as students would miss classes
and thus not learn enough. Everybody reading this
knows that, of course, they learned… probably more
than enough. In one of their final presentations, a
group stated: “The meeting was like an English
lesson – just one week long.”
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