Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter no. 5 - July 2015 | Page 70

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2015 Newsletter

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------eTwinning for a change!
by Nieves Méndez
Change and innovation are words so often heard
and repeated in educational settings nowadays and
the reason is not difficult to understand:
educational systems are almost desperately trying
to catch up with a society on the move – not always
really successfully, though.
In the last decades, we have witnessed the
transformation of family patterns, the swift rise of
mass media influence on people's lives and, above
all, the birth of new ways of accessing information
and knowledge, which undoubtedly results in a
totally different kind of pupil attending our classes.
However, have the teachers changed in the same
way? As far as I am concerned, I can still see a
dangerous gap between the model of teacher in
service these days – educated according to
methods and principles no longer suitable – and the
students to whom our lessons are addressed. That
is why a profound change is urgently needed.
Without this change it is not easy to achieve the
goals of any modern educational system.
The question that might immediately arise is how to
do it. First of all, we have to be aware of the real
picture. Paradoxically, in a world in which children
and teenagers have all the information they might
need at hand – ready to be keyed into any
connected device – the role of the teacher is now
more important than ever. Whereas they have fast
and easy access to data, they sometimes lack basic
personal resources to make good use of all the
information they are flooded with; our students are
so often deficient in motivation, self-esteem, selfconfidence and personal goals, being these some of
the most important reasons for failure and,
eventually, dropping out. From my point of view, it
is a must for teachers to provide students with what
they really need to be successful in life: the chance
to develop competences to become happy
responsible citizens. Easier said than done, of
course. But here is where eTwinning comes into
scene. eTwinning provides a proper well-defined
frame to update our methodology in a simple yet
an efficient way.

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