Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter 8 Visibility of eTwinning Projects Newsletter 8 | Page 25

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2018 Newsletter
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Scientix and eTwinning: Synergies and
opportunities
by Enrica Maragliano
Scientix and eTwinning are friend projects: both of
them are coordinated by the European Schoolnet, a
Brussels-based consortium of 34 ministries of
education, which is a driving factor for innovation in
teaching and learning and fosters pan-European
collaboration of schools and teachers, and both aim
at encouraging teachers to improve their teaching
methods. For this reason, Scientix and eTwinning
teachers have been organizing dissemination
activities to point out possible synergies and
opportunities useful for teachers (and not only
STEM teachers!).
For instance, the Italian eTwinning National Support
Service organized a webinar on March 27th 2018
about these topics, with the title “Scientix, la
comunità per l'educazione scientifica in Europa:
un'opportunità per innovare l'insegnamento delle
STEM”, where the speakers Serena Goracci from
INDIRE and Enrica Maragliano, Scientix and
eTwinning ambassador, showed to eTwinners the
advantages they can gain by using Scientix and its
resources in their everyday teaching practice. You
can find the link to the recorded version of the
webinar here.
Other webinars were organized in the last months:
- by Irina Vasiliscu, Anita Simac and Mariapia
Borgesan on May 22th 2018 within the Maths 2.0
Alumni Group with the title “An introduction to
Scientix and eTwinning”; you can find the
recording here;
- by Elena Vladescu as an eTwinning Live event on
June 7th with the title “eTwinning and Scientix
for beginners”; you can find the recording here.
Advantages for eTwinners who choose to use
Scientix resources
Also non-STEM eTwinning teachers can benefit from
using Scientix resources, as Scientix
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can provide with ideas and materials that
are useful to carry out cross-curricular
projects;
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can promote the interdisciplinarity and the
cross-curricular approach;
-
allows PBL approach;
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allows STEM teachers to find project
partners and non-STEM teachers to
introduce scientific and technological
elements into their projects by involving
colleagues of scientific subjects.
Advantages for Scientix teachers to develop
eTwinning projects
If you like, you can work with your class on a well
defined stand-alone project, without interacting
with what is “outside” your environment. Probably,
however, for teachers and students the incentives
are greater if the work is carried out with partners
from other schools and perhaps from other
counties. In this case, eTwinning is the perfect tool,
as a teacher can find in the wider community of
European teachers some partners suitable for the
project they have in mind, with many positive
aspects such as:
● the possibility to collaborate with colleagues
from the same country or foreigners and
their classes by refining and testing the
starting idea;
● exchanging ideas and good practices;
● improving the key competences in students,
in particular the awareness of European
citizenship, the conscious use of ICT and
the effective use of a foreign language.
Why Scientix for non-STEM teachers?
Non-STEM teachers can benefit from Scientix as
they are bound to find numerous ideas that can
help them to integrate in their projects scientific
topics, thus developing cross-curricular projects,
which are the ones that usually can have the best
results from a pedagogical point of view.
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