Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2023 Newsletter
eTwinning – a Living Learning Community by Cornelia Melcu
" eTwinning Onsite Course for Ambassadors 2023 : Building an Innovative Community " was the first face-to-face event organized by the Support Services for the European School Education Platform and eTwinning in 3 years . 100 ambassadors and representatives of national support organizations from eTwinning countries participated . The event was hosted and organized by Portugal ' s National eTwinning Support Organization in Lisbon and lasted three days from 27 to 29 April 2023 .
I was looking forward to attending such an event , as I have not attended international training workshops for ambassadors since June 2015 in Riga , Latvia , and the lived experiences and connections created during such a workshop are incomparably valuable and irreplaceable .
On the first day we listened the welcome speeches by : Wilhelm Vukovich , representative of the European Commission , Carla Lourenço , Directorate General of Education of the
Portuguese Ministry of Education , Teresa Lacerda , National eTwinning Support Organization Portugal and Baptista Routes , European eTwinning Support Centre . Then came Joana Cunha , who presented us " Top skills and Creative Problem Solving ", having as main theme ways to creatively solve different problems encountered in the learning process in various contexts . We ended the day with a plenary session where Marta Giuliani from the Support Services for the European School Education Platform and eTwinning spoke about the vital role of ambassadors in building and maintaining online communities .
The second day was dedicated to the training sessions . The first workshop I attended was " Collaborative Creative Solutions with Design Thinking " led by Irene Pateraki , where we were familiarized with the basics of Design Thinking – an iterative process in which we seek to understand needs , challenge assumptions , redefine problems and create innovative solutions that we can prototype and test . The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly visible at the initial level of understanding of the problem . We worked in international teams , going through the 5 stages of Design Thinking , to find creative solutions to problems arising from the work of an eTwinning ambassador . The creativity of the ambassadors has been proven : in order to motivate teachers to join the programme , my team proposed to organize an " eTwinning Fair ".
The following workshop was led by Adam Stepinski : " Developing Learning Communities through Project Engagement ". We managed to exchange practices and ideas to be applied in the projects we run , in a climate of good mood and well-being .
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