Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 2017 No. 7 | Page 120

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2017 Newsletter
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Collaboration and communication in
eTwinning projects
by Valerica Mititelu
During the school year 2016-2017 my 6 years old
students, being in their first year at school
participated in two eTwinning projects, which they
liked very much. The key of the success in such
projects is not only the theme and the competences
we want to develop in our students, but the real
collaboration and communication between partners
to find the best ways to make students participate
actively and to have fun while learning.
Communication and collaboration between
teachers involved in the project
Both projects, CHRISTMAS FUN and ART FORM
THE BIN started with a very good communication to
decide the activities, the terms, the responsibilities
for all partners. We used Twinspace for this, on
Forum, Teachers Journal, the communication on
emails, but Google Docs was the best way to add
our ideas and to make our final work with
everyone's help. We also used Google Slides for
our collaborative work.
The collaboration with the coleague from Greece
was more efficient when she agreed to participate
in the Regional Symposium "MODERN SCHOOL AND
ITS ROLE IN THE COMMUNITY" - within the
educational project "Education for change and its
values in the society ” where she talked about
'Christmas Fun' eTwinning project: partners'
collaboration and young learners' creations in order
to explain to our participants how was the
collaboration during our project.
Communication and collaboration between
students involved in the project
CHRISTMAS FUN was a collaborative one for all the
three months of project. The first activity was to
make Christmas cards and ornaments using
different techniques of work and send them (1 card
and 2-3 ornaments) to our partners. We also
worked on a miniature flag of our country to be
send too. Every school involved in the project
decorated the Christmas tree in the classroom with
the objects received by post. Another activity was
to record a traditional carol and translate into
English the lyrics in order to be understood by our
partners, and we made a common book of carols
from all the countries participant and links to the
songs to be listened to.
The wonderful part of the project was the meeting
with our partners. For the children, communication
is very important. They wanted to show their
partners how they spoke English while introducing
themselves, their traditional carol - live , they
asked their partners to say words related to
Christmas in our mother tongue and they tried to
repeat words in Greek and Lithuanian . A touching
moment was when, together, all students were
singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas!”.
ART FROM THE BIN was a project not only to
develop competences of citizenship, but a real
communication of ideas about how to protect the
environment, activities of learning by doing
communicated to the partners. All these were
possible with our collaboration.
During the school year, our students had three
activities to make products by different materials
(paper, plastic, old CD-ies, dough, carton/ plastic
120