El blog de la profe Judith: eTwinning in 140... or a bit more

A while ago I had to describe on Twitter what eTwinning is to me. To be honest, 140 characters is not much, but it helps being concrete, go to the core idea and avoid unnecessary ornaments. This is my tweet:

"eTwinning is a unique opportunity to release creativity, test skills, enjoy with colleagues with same interests and needs. Try it!"

Let's make this short X-ray grow a little bit. In my recent experience on eTwinning, I've taken part with other teachers on a project consisting on a handcrafts exchange by mail and testing our English skills. This project was not included in our curriculum, but I thought it could be a nice experience for my 6 year-old children... and it surpassed my expectations greatly!!

Kids were absolutely enthusiastic about the project, elaborating the most wonderful handcrafts and feeling eager to hear from their European peers. Can you imagine a better way to practice those initial dialogues in English? "My name is... I'm ... years old. I like... I don't like..." They could read and understand perfectly each message in a real situation (the post exchange with other schools). Motivation was so high they wanted to check the map whenever we got some new envelopes with the mail and even learn a bit more about those countries so far.

Along this process, I've also taken part on online activities in which ICT tools were a key point. Not only they facilitate collaboration between partners that are quite far from each other, but they're also very attractive, and most of them, very easy to use... It got quite addictive!

So we have, motivation, real practice of language skills and ICT. What can we do with these ingredients? Again, a new project! For a while now, trends in education talk, among others, about the flipped classroom and project based learning (PBL). I think it's easy to engage the class when you offer them a topic of their interest, and give them the main role on their learning process, let them search, investigate, reflect, do. Show them the new ICT tools, and they'll be asking for more.

One final point. Experiencing eTwinning enriches yourself both in a personal and professional way, but it also reaches your students -obviously- and your colleagues: those who weren't part of your project might soon want to join when they see the results by themselves. Enthusiasm spreads fast!! The school will benefit from it too: professionals with experience in collaborative projects with other European schools, the possibility to be awarded with national and European quality awards, and the chance to develop practices that combine innovation, ICT, languages, and PBL.

I'm not sure if I expressed myself clearly enough... why don't you check the site by yourself?