Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2026 Newsletter
Around the same time, colleagues from the group joined a series of webinars on ecolinguistics, exploring how the language we use shapes our relationship with the natural world. This strand emerged from a collaboration with the Featured Group " Health and Wellbeing in Education ", moderated by Daniela Bunea, whose suggestion I was grateful to take up. Bringing two communities together like that felt like exactly the kind of crosspollination that makes eTwinning special.
The Lesson That Did Not Go According to Plan Not everything worked. When we invited members to contribute to the Sustainability Lab: Classroom Activity Seeds at the Basic Skills Fair in May, nobody responded. The activity simply sat there, unanswered.
Within weeks it had been read, downloaded, embedded, and shared more than 500 times.
That number surprised and encouraged me. It means 25 classroom doors opened a little wider. It means ideas planted in one country took root somewhere else entirely.
Earlier, in March 2026, the group also developed a Sustainability Toolkit for Schools together, collecting practical suggestions on energy saving, water conservation, and waste reduction. These were not theoretical frameworks— they were things teachers had actually tried and found worthwhile.
I had to resist the instinct to see that as a personal failure. Instead, I tried to read it as information. Participation needs scaffolding. It needs a clear starting point, a gentle nudge, and sometimes a little more time. We plan to relaunch this activity with more support built in, and I suspect it will look different because of what that silence taught us.
My Own Classroom in the Picture Running this group has never been separate from my own teaching. This year I led two projects with my students that reflect everything the group stands for.
The first, " Urban Heat Islands: A Tale of Two Climates ", began with a question that sounds almost too simple: is it warmer in the city than in the countryside, and if so,
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