Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------eTwinning ideas and methodology to more people
and, at the same time, to increase our personal
skills.
how to disseminate webinars for eTwinners. In a
nutshell, it was a sort of webinar about how to run
webinars.
At first, we decided to run webinars about the
TwinSpace and we got some practice on that. Later
on, we also trained during Massimiliano
D’Innocenzo’s, one person from our NSS, basic
eTwinning webinars.
Furthermore, we tried to disseminate eTwinning in
other fields too. In May 2013, Françoise Altamura
checked out if there was anything about eTwinning
on Wikipedia – she found nothing but a very short
entry in the English Wikipedia. As a result, she
decided to launch a forum thread in our Teachers’
Room eTwinning e la Realtà. We got a lot of replies
and many eTwinners claimed they were willing to
collaborate to create an eTwinning entry on
the Italian Wikipedia.
One day Françoise Altamura had the idea to set up
a training TwinSpace for new eTwinners and our
NSS opened up a “sample” project to give new
eTwinners the opportunity to see a real TwinSpace
and train on it, before founding their own project.
Therefore, during our webinar sessions, we can
show the tools available in the TwinSpace and how
to use them. In the training TwinSpace, we can also
give our trainees some “homework” thanks to sets
of exercises arranged for them, e.g. “start up your
own activity page”, “try your hand at opening up a
file archive folder and upload a doc”, “build up a
wiki page”, etc.
Our (already well established) team carried out the
organization of the work. First of all, according to
our team’s work “philosophy”, we opened up a
shared google doc and began to jot down, comment
on and add topics.
Then, we began to arrange the entry picking up the
main ideas we had put together. Finally, we realized
that we had collected far too much material and
that we had to revise the newborn entry to make it
more “user-friendly” for a wider audience – parents,
pupils, teachers.
Elena Pezzi loaded all the items in her Wikipedia
Sandbox waiting for its publication. You can get a
clue of the stuff produced at Elena’s Sandbox:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:ElenapezziBO06
/Sandbox
During the online meetings (we have taken part in
quite a few of them), each of us has to explain a
segment or one or more tools of the TwinSpace: so
far new eTwinners have been quite satisfied with
the help supplied and have practiced a lot on the
training TwinSpace. We have had more than 350
teachers there!
Since we noticed that it had been a very good
experience, during the European Conference in
Catania, Massimiliano D’Innocenzo and some of us
suggested showing our way of working to a wider
audience. That is why we took part as panelists in a
webinar run by the Central Support Service
addressed to other European ambassadors. We
explained how to set up a project, how to run it and
However, not everything went in the right way and
we soon began to have some problems with the
Wikipedia’s “guardians”, as they have very strict
rules about copyright and ask for neutral language
to use – they thought we were too “enthusiastic” in
our presentation! It looked like there was no way
out…
Luckily, at the end we figured it out thanks to
Lorenzo Mentuccia, one person from our NSS, who
suggested in translating the already existing
eTwinning entry from English into Italian and
enriching it little by little, in order to avoid
“censorship”...
All our collaborative works were presented during
the European conference of eTwinning Ambassadors
in Catania, 17-19 October 2013.
Our way of collaborating and helping each other
went on during the following months. Some of us
were engaged as ambassadors to run seminars and
organize actions for implementing Erasmus+
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