Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Now my colleagues and I know better why we
prepare these projects. They are to change the
world by breaking the walls of prejudices towards
other nations, beliefs and lifestyles.
The “Invisible” Side of eTwinning within
Online Professional Development
by Cinzia Colaiuda
Nowadays eTwinning is the largest online
community of practice for schools in Europe. It is no
coincidence that, due to its growing relevance and
visibility in the European educational space, similar
platforms have been developed to respond to
specific academic purposes.
Even if eTwinning means mainly development of
European e-projects, this platform offers also new
professional development perspectives for teachers
not only through official online training events,
eTwinning groups or teachers rooms, but also
through informal training procedures.
I am sure I will start new projects soon. That is the
wish of my students and colleagues and also of the
principal of my school.
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Such procedures play an important role in many of
the e-activities that teachers, as well as pupils,
develop in a spontaneous way during online
interactions on the platform: in many of these
cases eTwinning means enhancement of the
plurilingual dimension in education, intercultural eencounters, informal exchanges of didactic and
methodological approaches.
The use of new ICT tools for online collaboration
follows often the same informal way of application,
and surely this aspect of the platform is the most
visible in many of the online activities. But at the
same time it is the most invisible part of eTwinning
for the “actors”, that is the teachers, involved in a
continuous and almost unconscious training
process.
As an eTwinner and eTwinning ambassador, this
perception of unconsciousness encouraged me
when I had to write a report on the use of cloud
computing in education for the Comenius Project
“School on the cloud”.
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