Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2014 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------written in English and their native tongue. My
students jumped at the idea, from the 4th graders
to the 8th graders. So we wrote about 70 postcards
and sent them to over 50 partner schools. Once we
got our fair share of postcards, we could not decide
what to do with them… after some thinking we
decided some sort of map was in order. And we
tried. Not the best one we could have done but it
was done. A few months later a new idea occurred
to us: recording messages in the 19 languages of
our partner schools, adding their location on a map,
making collages from the postcards we had gotten
from each school and creating something unique.
Zeemaps was preferred over Google Maps, and the
fun we had recording was worth it.
Mapping Europe
We learnt to work with Audacity for the first time,
and how to research and read phonetic transcripts
to be able to say things correctly in all the
languages. Soon, some other partners joined in
with their own recordings, so we thought of a new
way to spice things up: a voice card, plain old
greeting card containing a chip one of the students
programmed. That was an unforgettable
experience. Then came “Made for Europe”, the
competition for final products of European projects,
and we found ourselves representing our city at the
national phase of that competition in Bucharest,
with our interactive Zeemap. But misfortune struck
and technical issues reared their ugly head: the
result, all our recordings were muted… somebody
had accidentally muted the volume on the computer
used for the presentation. So, we learnt a new
lesson: always have a backup plan. Of course we
did not win anything, but then again, eTwinning
was barely starting to be present at “Made for
Europe”.
lucky: we found the answer: videoconferences. In
2013 we started one of our most successful project
so far, called “YES – Young Europeans Speak”,
where we partnered up with lots of schools all over
Europe and made a project specifically designed for
foreign languages. Students could choose one of
the four topics and talk about it, using any web tool
they saw fit.
It was just two classes working on this project, one
where students had absolutely no motivation for
anything, where half the class was either asleep or
talking about anything else but school. But when
they got their own account on eTwinning, that class
came alive. They did not get all bright and better
over night, but there were visible improvements.
They wanted to get to know new people, came to
the videoconferences, talked about their ideal
school, teachers, their hobbies.
The other class was more motivated, mixed abilities
and all, but linguistically better. What they
proposed one day took me by surprise.