Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 6 2016 | Page 67

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2016 Newsletter

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The 63rd European Competition – Prepared
with eTwinning
by Heidi Giese
What is the European Competition? Video:
https://vimeo.com/101064752
How we knew each other
In September 2015 I saw a request from our
German NSS on their facebook Germany page
stating that a school in Greece was looking for a
German partner to participate in a project and to
apply with for the 63rd European Competition. This
competition is one of the oldest ones in Germany. I
didn’t know it before, but I had heard about the
possibility to prepare a project with eTwinning for
this kind of contest.
eTwinning live for planning project work
I always enjoy exploring the possibilities which
eTwinning offers and so I started this adventure in
October 2015 with my ICT teacher colleague
Monika, the Greek partners Chara (teacher of
German) and Voula (teacher of English) and at a
certain stage of the project also with a colleague at
my own school who teaches music. We first planned
our project by meeting several times via eTwinning
live. This is a really useful opportunity - instead of
skype - within the eTwinning homepage as it
incorporates an adobe connect meeting center
where every teacher registered to eTwinning
(etwinning.net) can reserve a meeting session from
about 30 minutes up to several hours choosing a
time slot that suits all partners. We met online
several times before starting our eTwinning project
and it was always a pleasure speaking to Chara and
Voula sitting in Greece and us here about 2000 km
away in the middle of Germany. We prepared the
project, but we also talked about our families, our
schools and how our students work. We got to
know and like each other and after our second
meeting with eTwinningLive we had clear ideas
about what we might achieve with our students
throughout the school year.

Collaborative tools
We wanted the Greek and German students to
collaborate as much as possible and so we looked
for ICT tools with a collaborative possibility as
voicethread.com, padlet.com, thinglink.com. It is
important not to just post the students’ work in the
Twinspace. This would be a simple collection of
output. In such a way students often don’t get to
know each other. And that would really be a pity,
wouldn’t it?
Mixed European teams
Another clue for a better collaboration of European
partners within an eTwinning project can be the
creation of mixed teams. You need the names of all
European partners and can then use
http://teamup.aalto.fi/ to form groups. Choose a
symbol for each country‘s members. Teamup gives
several possibilities to talk about the project work,
give feedback ask for help and so on.

Teac