Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 101

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ materials concerning the dissemination of the project as well as its medium and long term implementation at our school. It will also be a permanent bridge to connect with other European schools and might be inspiring for those who want to take advantage of the wonderful opportunities offered by Erasmus+ or need information and advice about course providers. Flexibility, a wide range of possibilities and above all a user-friendly safe environment are its key features making it an excellent online platform to manage challenging projects such Erasmus+KA1. After weeks of planning and emails, we finally kicked it off in September and we are confident the team working on it will have a definite impact on all the target students and teachers. The former have begun creating games, stories, plays, learning how to take an interview, but most importantly, understanding how they really learn. The first few weeks were dedicated to celebrating EDL together, learning about each other, creating a logo and voting the best one, organising Safer Internet Day activities, presenting the project to parents and preparing for the first teacher meeting in Lithuania, between 11-14 December. Francesca Falconi works as a teacher of English language and culture at Liceo T. Mamiani, an upper secondary school in Pesaro, Italy. She has been an eTwinning ambassador since 2018. Learning Differently with Creative Writing by Loredana Popa Last year, a courageous group of teachers from 5 different countries decided it was high time something was done regarding young people’s poor skills when it came to understand written texts and expressing themselves. Being able to understand, really comprehend a text, with its nuances and elusive meaning at times, being able to synthesise information, not just copy paste it with no regards to punctuation, coherence, all this meant students often do their literature and language tasks just to have them done and not retaining anything, not gaining any knowledge, not improving as people. This gave us an idea, to write a KA229 project, accompanied by an eTwinning one, called Learning Differently, as we wanted to change the paradigm, make learning meaningful and fun, unforgettable and useful, give it purpose, by changing our methods, learning from one another and involving the students in the process and allowing them to be creators of content. Coordinated by a relentless, hardworking team from Gedminu progimnazija, Klaipeda, Lithuania, 4 other schools joined. Soon we were 5 motivated schools, Lithuania, Croatia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania (School nr.17 Botoșani). The Romanian students, all the 6 th graders, 3 classes, really outdid themselves, searching for information on each country, linguistic, cultural, historical, culinary. They also looked for personalities and created trading cards or posters, summarising what they had read, including arts and crafts if they felt like. From trading cards to introduce themselves to trading cards with traditional recipes, a cookbook with desserts from all 5 countries, main courses and other recipes, a tourist’s guide in terms of famous places, natural and cultural heritage, a dive into the countries’ 101