Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter no. 5 - July 2015 | Page 81

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2015 Newsletter

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“Stories in a Photo” – Collaborative creative
writing in eTwinning projects
by Ana-Maria Ghioc
“Stories in a Photo” –
http://twinspace.etwinning.net/6647 – is the joint
initiative of the Romanian team from “Grigore
Moisil” National College which I coordinated and the
Turkish team from Türk Telekom Nurettin Topçu
Sosyal Bilimler Lisesi, coordinated by my colleague,
Özgür Ergin. The springboard for the project lay in
the fact that our students are avid photographers,
their accounts on social networks bursting with
selfies and other photos. However, they do not
show the same enthusiasm in our writing classes,
their most frequent complaints being that they lack
creativity or imagination, that they cannot advance
past the first two lines of a story, or – worse – that
they have no story to tell. To trick them into writing
or better said to unlock their writing potential we
resorted to their own photos and turned them into
writing prompts for the activities in the project. In
addition, to lower their anxiety and encourage
active participation, we organized them in groups,
both national and mixed-nationality, throughout the
preparatory activities and the main activities of the
project, our rationale being that peer collaboration
would spark mutual inspiration and lead to
language improvement.
The two main activities of the project consisted in
writing stories starting from the footage provided
by the partner team from the other country. The
national teams were further divided into groups of
four