Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 120

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter
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No Man Is an Island: eTwinning and Erasmus+
hand in hand
by Elena Pezzi
How many eTwinning projects will I have done with
my students in all these years? And how many
Socrates, Comenius and Erasmus+ projects have I
been involved in since I was infected with the
Europeanisation virus?
Surely dozens, and certainly some of the most
engaging and motivating activities were those in
which eTwinning and Erasmus+ merged together to
create exciting projects both online and in
presence!
I would like to tell you something about the latest
project of this kind, a three-year Erasmus+
partnership which is also, at the same time, an
eTwinning project between six partner schools from
five different countries.
All the activities lead to a collaborative "Heritage
Catalogue" of all partners and a "Cross-cultural
newscast" in which we will show the characteristics
of the "other" through our eyes.
The activities involve a heterogeneous group of
teachers and students of various school orders,
between 14 and 18 years old. All the students work
actively on the project; we want to stimulate
knowledge and collaboration among young
Europeans from European schools all over the world
using English as a language of communication with
an action-oriented approach and project-based
learning.
The modular structure and the different tasks have
allowed all pupils to work according to the rhythms
and methods best suited to them, always with a
view to collaboration and the implementation of
activities.
The title? No Man is an Island, because we are
convinced that only from communication,
collaboration, interaction can come something
beautiful and special for us, for our students and,
hopefully, also for our society. As far as pupils are concerned, for some of them
this was their first eTwinning project, for mine it
was their third, so I didn't have to involve them
particularly, on the contrary they had a beneficial
"towing" effect by hooking up the new pupils and
getting them immediately into the collaborative
atmosphere.
All the partners are eTwinners who have been
active for a long time (three of us are also
eTwinning Schools) and by common agreement we
wanted to create a space where we could share and
collaborate beyond the simple repository of
materials, where to meet and work together on the
mutual knowledge of our schools, countries and
cultural heritage. In fact, the other fundamental aspect of the project
is its opening to the whole school, allowing pupils
from different classes to work together on the
project, already experiencing at school the
collaboration that we have established at European
level.
The leitmotif of the project is the discovery of our
cultural heritage, of what makes us unique and
special but, at the same time, makes us recognize
what each of us owes to the "other" in the
construction of a piece of its own identity.
We also wanted to disseminate the good practices
already implemented in our institutions to make the
school a place where values of respect, inclusion,
interculturalism and active citizenship are
promoted.
During the project we have run common activities,
such as:
- the creation of the national and international logos
- the collaborative creation of some episodes of a
webradio program
- a joint discussion (debate) on some topics of
common interest
- the celebration of some important dates (World
Heritage Day, Earth Day, etc.)
The project is fundamental to change our attitude
towards the teaching-learning process. The
students themselves learn language and cultural
content in a more lively and effective way in an
informal and pedagogically focused context. From
this point of view, the emotional aspect is also very
important, creating deep bonds between students
and teachers.
The integration in the curriculum is evident in all
phases of the project, which is based on the
methodology of project based learning and task
approach, whose objectives are that the pupils
develop skills and acquire at the same time the
curriculum content.
The topics on which the students have reflected and
worked collaboratively all refer to the different
phases of learning both of a foreign language and
culture and of the contents developed in the mother
tongue, also according to the CLIL perspective and
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