What does a Good ETwinning
Project look like
SPICING UP STATISTICS WITH ETWINNING…THEN ERASMUS+
“Talk to any maths teacher and they’ll tell you that statistics is a very dry subject; students can’t deal with it because they just don’t feel inspired.” Ian Kell, maths teacher and international coordinator at the Academy at Shotton Hall, Peterlee, explains how working through eTwinning has helped make the topic of statistics more relevant for his students, and given them the tools and space for their curiosity to flourish. In a bid to breathe new life into the topic, the Academy at Shotton Hall and its partner schools in Georgia, Belgium, Ukraine and Serbia took part in the eTwinning maths project ‘My world, my classroom.’
The initial idea for the project came to Ian one Friday afternoon when he had the rather daunting task of keeping his Year 9 students focused on the subject of ratios. However, he
noticed that their interest was immediately piqued when he asked them to work out the proportion of people in the world who spoke English.
This prompted Ian and his partners to put their heads together to come up with a project framework where their mission would be to improve the teaching and learning of maths in their
schools and boost students’ motivation in the subject, as well as foster a sense of European identity and genuine curiosity towards one another’s languages and cultures.
Making statistics more relevant and engaging for young learners
“Each partner represented the demographics of their towns and countries. For example, if each country was a class of thirty students we would, using the proportions in the world, explore how many of the class would be hungry, what languages would be spoken, how many would be in poverty, how many would be able to read, be able to have clean water and how many would be rich”, Ian explained.
Over the course of the project, students took turns to submit maths challenges to each other through the project’s secure online platform, known as the eTwinning TwinSpace, all of which required them to follow real life data handling tasks. Once they had the statistic for each country,
students then identified the best way to present their results, such as through animated cartoons, PowerPoint presentations and online magazines:
“The main thing for students is that they could see the point of what they were doing because there was a clear end product, which made the learning easier”, Ian affirmed. “They started to recognise that this was something they would use in their everyday lives and, all of a sudden, they realised that they’d almost been tricked into liking maths!”As well as improving students’ overall grasp of statistics, the project’s collaborative nature showed them that maths could also be fun and relevant, which gave Ian’s students a real confidence boost: “Part of our work as teachers is making sure that we have confident students who actually believe they’ve got the ability to go on to study maths. To make maths accessible, so that
students can see the reason why they’re doing it, is a key factor in encouraging them to continue studying maths beyond GCSE”, Ian explained.
Meeting curriculum objectives and strengthening digital skills
As a cross curricular project, ‘My world, my classroom’ gave students the chance to hone their skills and meet curriculum objectives not only in maths, but in history, geography and ICT: “The whole eTwinning platform is digital, which helped students to improve and develop their digital skills, such as by trying new pieces of software and using Skype. For a lot of people Skype is commonplace, but there’s no need for Skype if you’re from Peterlee and everyone around you is from Peterlee”, said Ian. The project involved inter school collaboration and Ian worked closely with the ICT department to ensure that students used their ICT lessons to research the different digital tools they could use to present their investigation results, from video animations and graphs to an online magazine and project website. Having an audience of peers for their work, students shared with pesentations with their partners via the TwinSpace and video onferencing.“We had a fantastic relationship with the ICT department and the students loved playing around ith all the different packages without the threat or idea of an exam at the end of it all – it was
just quite nice to play around and see what they could actually do!” Ian reflected.