Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 6 2016 | Page 39

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2016 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I can honestly say that during the shooting for the main part of this project, a video about Hungary, we had the time of our lives with my students. We held a big Hungarian breakfast, shot the video then ate all up :) It was so good to be together that we had other breakfasts later on too, a French and an American one. All these small pieces of cultural knowledge that I know my students would never forget in their whole lives. The culmination is definitely the video itself, where one of my girls is singing a song about Hungary, another has shot a short video about her dog (a traditional Hungarian breed), the girls volunteered to dress up and dance- all these made the video so special. Eva Toth http://www.pinterest.com/evatoth547727/ has been a teacher of English in a vocational and technical school in Nagykáta, Hungary for 6 years. She has been dealing with ICT in education to lower the digital and social gap, and she is a winner of the prizes Sulinetwork 2014 Award and Digital Teacher Award 2014. She is the author of many articles and translations about practical examples of ICT use, also a teacher trainer of ICT. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Using an eTwinning Project for Mentoring Teachers by Diana Linford This article will show how an eTwinning project can be used to mentor teachers in using eTwinning and Erasmus+. I was asked by the head teachers of my local cluster of schools to train colleagues in the use of eTwinning and Erasmus+. We decided to use a shared eTwinning project so that everyone could learn through participating. We used a Christmas project, rather than a subject specific project, so that pupils of all ages could take part – and this also enabled more teachers to participate. Our ‘Christmas around Europe 2015’ eTwinning Plus project therefore included a number of my loc al schools and several international partners. The project was designed with teaching and learning elements for both pupils and teachers as we intended to use the project to mentor colleagues in the use of eTwinning and to find partners for Erasmus+ projects. The project for pupils The project was based around the exchange of instructions for making Christmas decorations. We started with a logo competition – this is something we now do regularly as it helps the pupils to understand the project, and be involved, right from the start. We used the Project Journal regularly through the project. Here you have Hungary as presented by class 11/2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EDCgA18lBk For the main part of the project, pupils made videos and wrote explanations for each other about how to make decorations. In each school, we tried some 39