Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 2017 No. 7 | Page 124

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2017 Newsletter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ eTwinning: A tool for teachers’ professional development by Antonietta Calò Filling in the Mobility Tool and the Beneficiary’s Dashboard for the closing of my Erasmus +KA1 project has given me the chance to reflect on my professional development as a Foreign Language (FL) teacher and, above all, as an etwinner. But let’s start from the beginning… June 2015: the two-year project “Europa 2020: docenti formati, studenti preparati “ (Europe 2020:trained teachers, skilled students) that I planned within the Erasmus+ programme was approved and funded, allowing 13 people of my Institute- teachers and administrative employees- to join European training courses. In October, I attend a training course in Cardiff entitled “Using technology for teaching English”. project, where we could upload the results we would get with our students thanks to our innovative teaching methods. With this collaboration the eTwinning project “eTwinning: a tool for teachers’ professional development” was born! During that school year, I showcased all the results I was getting with my students in all the official dissemination meetings I ran as an eTwinning Ambassador for Campania region, pointing out how eTwinning had helped me in planning a winning Erasmus+ project and how its platform was supporting me in the running of the whole KA1 in my school. Thanks to my expertise, I was called to be a member of the project group for the planning of the KA1 Consortium – call 2016 - on behalf of the Regional School Board. The project was approved and it funded 22 Digital Champions of different schools in Campania to attend a training course abroad. Luckily I was one of the group of the trainees and in October 2016 I attended the course in Ipswich on “Using technology effectively to enhance English”. Once again eTwinning was the core of my own professional development and at the same time the starting point for my colleagues’ professional improvement. Moreover, before our departure for the Training Course, the Italian National Support Service approved my eTwinning project ”Campania Digitale per Europa 2020” (Digital Campania for Europe 2020). In the TwinSpace of this project, each teacher joining the Consortium had their own school page where to share any personal teaching experience deriving from the training abroad. In this way the dedicated eTwinning project was a tool to collect results, outcomes, innovative teaching methods and approaches, but also a tool to share and disseminate good practice among teachers’ communities and connections. Here I met EFL teachers from different grades of schools and from different European countries to whom I proposed my idea to create an eTwinning Considering that the group of 22 Digital Champions attended not only a training course about the use of 124