Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 2017 No. 7 | Page 46

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2017 Newsletter
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
useful in determining what significant
content you may need to reinforce or re-
teach to the entire class or to a select few
students.
3- With SlideShare, Prezi, Kizoa, Emaze etc.
you can push the boundaries of traditional
presentations, and make learning more
engaging than ever before.
4- You can try Animoto, PhotoPeach etc. - free
video integration tools in your classroom for
projects, presentations, parent meetings
and more.
5- By using Charles Kelley’s Quiz Generator,
Sokrative, Kahoot, you can create multiple
choice or bilingual tests.
Useful tools for effective online synchronous
activities in an eTwinning project
by Enrica Maragliano
One of the most important elements in achieving a
good eTwinning project is the real collaboration
between the students in the involved classes.
To improve this collaboration, teachers need to use
appropriate software tools, such as Padlet or the
resources made available by Google (Google Drive,
Google Docs etc.): these tools are certainly useful
to help students to work efficiently and effectively
being far each other, but often young people are
more stimulated to work together and share ideas if
they can interact directly online with their partners
who are far away.
For a couple of years now, the Italian National
Support System has been training ambassadors to
realize how important it is to use synchronous
communication in eTwinning projects. I attended
the online training course last year and learned a
lot: the course was mainly useful to help me to
reflect on how I planned and implemented the
activities I had actually done, considering the
positive and the less successful aspects of my work.
At the end of the course, I produced a video with
Adobe Spark, whose link is at this address:
https://spark.adobe.com/video/A1FbpCHYYAEWR.
I invite you to use web 2.0 tools in your lessons.
Add photos to Slideshare and use it with your
students or let students try it. Find your place on
the Google map and ask students how they use
Google map on their school work. Upload a class
video to YouTube. See how a wiki supports the
gradual development of a setting. Then share with
all of us what you have learned about this new way
of telling!
Just reflecting on these activities I got convinced
that online activities are essential to projects,
though they are often marginal with regard to
timing and they are also very difficult to be
managed and organized because you often have to
face big real problems, like the different time zones,
the different organization of school time, the time
tables of the involved classes, the possibility of
having all the classes participating in the project at
the same time for the same purpose.
All this is, of course, much more difficult when
many partners are involved in the project.
Based on last year's experience and after a strong
reflection in the summer, this year, together with
the partners of the two new eTwinning projects that
I worked on, I organized several online
synchronous activities whether or not included in
the context of a videoconference.
Gulhanim Dursun has been teaching since 1996.
She teaches primary school subjects and likes
working with ICT and special pupils. She believes
that we have to get our pupils ready for life and we
have to show and teach all about it.
The first activity I want to tell was done using
Socrative with the new partners of the project
"Migrants through the ages" but on the lines of
what we did the year before with the partners of
the project “My world of Math".
46