Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 6 2016 | Page 71

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2016 Newsletter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In Module 6 students had the chance to imagine what their “Dream school” was like by taking into consideration special ways of making a difference in their learning. Referring to how they learn, the compulsory subjects, the ideology of the school, teaching methods, each partner presented its dream school involving learners creating a digital story or a collage or a Power Point Presentation. They could use tools such as Youtell, Kizoa, Youblisher, Genial.ly etc. and upload the final product in the proper Page. After that, each school partner voted for the best dream school based on specific criteria (originality, effectiveness and depth) by using www.tricider.com Finally, students had to listen to the song "The Wall" by Pink Floyd so to collaborate to create a new song entitled "My dream school". Every partner contributed with a verse. Module 7 focused on Dissemination and evaluation. Exploiting Padlet walls, pupils wrote their ideas evaluating the project by writing what they liked about it and what they did not. In groups, they used photos to create final presentations and videos with Kizoa Video maker. While describing our eTwinning experience I skipped Module 3 only because it was about Christmas traditions and so not part of the main topic. However, it was really interesting and involving because students had to describe Christmas traditions to the partner countries and compare them. They shared their Xmas information in PowerPoint Presentations, but also they prepared and sent Xmas cards to each other. In addition, pupils used the Forum to exchange wishes and share photos of themselves while opening the received greeting cards. According to our planned project, nearly every month our Greek coordinator created a Page for the new Module with the topic, tasks, tools but also giving suggestions how to interact and share final products. Each school partner involved its own students developing the activities exploiting different strategies and approaches in order to reach the common aim. My pupils carried out their tasks during our curricular lessons and throughout the presentation step the topics were generally introduced by a brainstorming activity to elicit previous knowledge and ideas. Sometimes we used videos, pictures, questionnaires to encourage their curiosity. In plenary, pupils were stimulated to talk about their ideas in relation to the module they had to develop. During the production step, divided in small groups they carried out researches, collected pictures and information useful for the given task. After that, they used to select all the collected materials in order to produce the required or chosen final product. In groups they cooperated and interacted respecting roles and rules following the Cooperative Learning strategies. In the end, each group had to present and describe its own material to the class so to choose the best product to share in the TwinSpace. In this project communication and cooperation were important also for the teachers. We exploited as much as possible all the available tools of the TwinSpace so the Teachers’ Bulletin, the Project Journal sustained the improvement of the initial idea of this project. We often utilized the Mail Box because it notified us the emails so it allowed to check immediately the messages. Every month, we used them to talk about the introduction of the new module in order to set the process, the activities and the final products to share in the proper Page. The Mail Box was useful to do some adjustment but we particularly enjoyed Live events because we could meet and discuss directly when we needed to rearrange the activities. Not only, they were really 71