eTwinning Conference 2008

... made many of us stand up to take photos or join the dancers.
The dance with the wooden sticks reminded us of the Pauliteiros de Miranda

Teresa Fernandes, Portugal

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by Teresa Fernandes

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After the workshops on tools and other topics, after the exhibition talks and useful contacts with colleagues of the various countries represented, here we are at dinner time over a traditional romanian dinner

Teresa Fernandes, Bucharest, March 2008

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Back home after traveling for hours and I can’t stop thinking about the conference and its impact.
Marc Durando’s closing speech was very interesting indeed. His suggestion that we are moving from e-confidence to e-maturity is a useful distinction. However, I think we should all keep in mind that different schools will be at a different part of the spectre even in the same country. At some point Mr Durando said: “What is ICT in schools? Is it anything more than web searches, Powerpoint presentations and word processing?� I hope that at some schools it is much more than this but in my school if I mange to do all these things I will have achieved my goals 200%.
He also talked about the basic characteristics of e-twinning, namely the fact that it is simple, reliable, multilingual, project and practice oriented, community building. All these characteristics add to its charm and these are the reasons it has been so successful and so loved by teachers and students all over Europe.
But I think that the main reason we do all these things and the answer to the question of my last post may be found in the closing quotation by Albert Einstein which I reproduce as well as I remember it: “…to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge�.

Thanks a lot to all the organizers for a very good conference. See you all next year!

Anna Varna – e-twinning ambassador, English teacher, Larissa, Greece

The Greek delegation in full plus Kiki Haynes (of Greek origins)

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Happy teachers from RUNNER-UP project in eTwinning Prize category Science and Maths "Draw me the task".

This project is a fun approach to teaching basic mathematics concepts to younger pupil.
The jury said, “this project demonstrates how effective a simple approach to a topic can be. The children obviously learned a lot while having fun�.

Kiki Haynes to the right in the picture told us how her students independently worked with different kinds of software, and even prepared rich documentation - both to help her present the process and results, and for others to share knowledge of these great tools.

• Kiki Haynes tells about the contribution of her students. Short audio interview (wav 8 MB).


• More about Draw me the task in the project's public twinspace.


• Student's documentation on "Use of software": Download pdf file


• Here's a dump from the beginning of the document...
  

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Teacher Inger Nielsen from Denmark went to the Workshop Session: "Your eTwinning – Pedagogy".

We talked to her about her impressions from the workshop. Inger says:

�In this workshop Anne Gilleran asked the participants to comment on a few questions concerning different pedagogical aspects of eTwinning In the future.
One of the questions was:
What do you think would be a suitable alternative prize to eTwinning Camp?

A few ideas from the participants were:
- money to take pupils to visit their partner school
- the winning school should have a team of experts in their school for 3 days to show/teach pupils and teachers the eTwinning possibilities
- funds for technology and training on how to use technology for eTwinning and time for the teacher to train.

Many of the participants think that there is quite a problem about the eTwinning 1st prize now, because all the pupils/classes in the winner projects can not go to the camp because of the limit of participants.�

Posted by Claus Berg, NSS Denmark

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New ideas, new partners, many inspiration, enthusiasm - all those feelings were in group of Slovakian teachers. They had very good opportunity to meet colleagues, to share information and saw other countries work in real projects. They want to continue much more and believe that it is very useful for them and their pupils too.

Podolanova,gabriela.podolanova etwinning.sk

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The first workshop that we wisited today was about eTwinning tools. The workshop started with a very charismatic presentation about Flashmeeting by John Warwick. He gave us a good overview of Flashmeeting possibilities and illustrated it with various examples.
The next presenter – Christian Komonen introduced webmagazine- Magazinefactory. This is a tool that is well-known tool for many eTwinners. It was interesting to know, that Magazinefactory is developing and it is now possible to embed Youtube videos and interactive Google maps. Both above mentioned tools are easy to use. It is also important that the environments are safe to use for project work.
Thomas Maier finished the workshop with a talk about blogging and podcasts. He explained the notion of podcasting and also demonstrated how to use podcasts for project work and how to find good educational podcasts.
All the presentations were inspiring and interesting and it would be nice if the powerpoint presentations were put up into the blog, so we could go through them once more at home. Thank you for a wonderful workshop.
Meeri Sild, teacher from Estonia

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Lemill is a community for finding, authoring and sharing free and open learning resources. It`s like Wikipedia for educational resources.
Teachers can create and share content - such as webpages, presentations, exercises and video - methods, tools and join the online community. LeMill offers a built-in tool to generate different kinds of exercises.
The website is user-friendly. Feedback from teachers is allways welcome. Lemill is very popular in Estonia - where it was developed - and also in its neighbouring countries and it is slowly spreading over Europe. It is available in 10 languages.

The presentation of Lemill is available on slideshare

The MELT-portal is also an environment for sharing educational resources. It is a database with learning objects from all over Europe.
The users can add comment for each learning resource (website, presentation,…) and you can easily search for materials in your own language.

Robert Conings is an webapplication teacher in a vocational school in Maasmechelen, a village in the east of Belgium. He is one of the Belgian teachers that participates in the MELT-project.

What do you think about the MELT-project?
Robert: “ The success of this project depends on the willingness of teachers to share their work with colleagues all around Europe. The MELT project stimulates teachers to share their learning materials.�

Why should teachers share their work on the MELT-website?
Robert: "Why not share a good idea with fellow teachers and pick up new ideas in reverse? Teachers improve their teaching by learning from each other."

How many teachers are working with MELT?
Robert: "We are now just starting with the portal, so I would like to invite all teachers in Europe to join us!"

Social bookmarking is also a helpfull tool for sharing your resources with other teachers in Europe. In stead of just bookmarking your favourite websites in your browser and save them to your own desktop you can save them online and share them on websites like deli.cio.us. The advantage of social bookmarking is that you can tag your sites with more than one key word and you can search for other websites with the same tag. Your bookmarks can be interesting for other teachers.

All teachers can benefit from sharing and collaborative authoring learning resources. eTwinning is about learning from each other, so projects like Lemill, MELT and social bookmarking are a logical next step for eTwinners.

Posted by: Bart Verswijvel – teacher in Immaculata Instituut Oostmalle Belgium
Robert Conings – teacher in PTS Maasmechelen Belgium
Sara Gilissen – NSS eTwinning Department of Education Flemish Community Belgium

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Last day of the conference today and I’m trying to gather my thoughts together and decide what the gist of yesterday’s second day was.

Early in the morning I attended the Intercultural learning opportunities in eTwinning workshop with Petru Dumitru and you can find more details and the files of that presentation here

Mr Demetru mentioned the limitations that may exist in schools that make intercultural (and all kind of) projects difficult. I was a bit disappointed to check many of them exist in my school. Lack of facilities, limited computer skills, limited language skills and more. But I suppose this happens more or less everywhere and we shouldn’t be discouraged. Conditions will always be difficult for teachers, I have yet to meet a teacher who works in excellent conditions. The important thing is to be open and available for working with children, for giving this little extra time and dedication that will change someone’s life. Throughout this whole conference I am most amazed by how much teachers work with their students, how committed they are. I am inspired by their work and I am looking forward to going back to class and sharing with my students (and colleagues) what I learned here.

In the photo Stamatis Papadakis, one of the teachers that presented intercultural activities in Mr Dumitru's workshop

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9:30 and the teachers in charge of the three runner-up projects are ready to show and explain them to the rest of us.
We start with the youngest category (4 to 10 year-old children) and we are so proud to find two teachers from Spain in the project called H@and in H@and. We were told about how difficult it was to find partners before the eTwinning portal was available (thousands and thousands of e-mails sent everywhere, fingers crossed while waiting for answers), and then step by step we were given the details of the project. It was a dynamic, entertaining and amusing presentation which maintained people’s attention all the time and made us laugh more than once (and that is always something to be grateful for).
It was then the turn for the runner-up in the 2nd category, the project called Aspects of Religion in Europe, run by three countries Belgium, Denmark and Greece. It was extremely interesting to discover how a “tough� subject (and this is the opinion of the own teachers running the project) can be turned into something amusing and motivating for teenagers.
And last but in no way least, the turn for the runner-up in the third category, the project called Facciamoci noi lezione!!!, from Germany and Italy. After a minute’s wait to solve some problems with the Internet connection (you know how things are sometimes…) they showed us some of the language teaching materials produced by the students to be used in class and we do believe the teachers involved in the project when they tell us that these are much more motivating for students than the materials we often use in class.
And just as they did yesterday, all the teachers mentioned and thanked their pupils; it is only fair to do so, without them none of the eTwinning projects would have been possible. Thanks a lot to all of them!!!

9:30 y los profesores a cargo de los proyectos finalistas en las tres categorías están preparados para enseñárnoslos y explicárnoslos al resto de nosotros.
Empezamos con la categoría de alumnos más jóvenes (de 4 a 10 años) y estamos muy orgullosos de encontrar dos profesoras de España en el proyecto H@and in H@and. Se nos cuenta lo difícil que resultaba encontrar socios para los proyectos antes de que el portal de eTwinning estuviera disponible ( miles y miles de correos electrónicos enviados, los dedos cruzados en espera de respuestas), y luego paso a paso se nos fueron dando los detalles del proyecto. Fue una sesión dinámica, entretenida y graciosa que mantuvo nuestra atención durante todo el tiempo y nos hizo reír a menudo (lo cual siempre es de agradecer).
Fue entonces el turno del finalista de la 2ª categoría, el proyecto llamado Aspects of Religión in Europe, realizado por profesores de Bélgica, Dinamarca y Grecia. Resultó muy interesante ver cómo una asignatura tradicionalmente “dura� (y ésta es la opinión de las propias profesoras a cargo del proyecto) puede convertirse en algo divertido y motivador para los adolescentes.
Y por último, aunque de ninguna manera menos importante, el turno del finalista en la 3ª categoría, el proyecto Facciamoci noi lezione!!! de Alemania e Italia. Después de un minuto de espera para solucionar problemas con la conexión a Internet (ya se sabe cómo son estas cosas a veces…) nos mostraron algunos de los materiales de aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras producidos por los propios alumnos para utilizar en clase y creemos a las profesoras cuando nos dicen que resultan mucho más atractivos para ellos que los que con frecuencia usamos en clase.
Y, tal y como hicieron ayer, todos los profesores mencionaron y dieron las gracias a sus estudiantes. Es totalmente justo hacerlo, sin ellos ninguno de los proyectos eTwinning hubiera sido posible. ¡¡¡Muchísimas gracias a todos ellos !!!

Posted by Beatriz Martínez Nieves, teacher from I.E.S. Las Llamas, Santander, Spain

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Talked to some colleagues about sharing photos taken during the conference; an easy way of doing just that is through web based storage. One of the largest (if not the largest) photo storage sites - and photo communities - is Flickr, nowadays owned by Yahoo!. The Flickr user interface is a bit cluttered but if you want to store all your photos remotely, plus access and share them anywhere through the Internet, the FlickrPro service is a super deal. And no, unfortunately I don't get a percentage of the Pro registrations..

What about Picasa from Google, then? Well, Picasa definitely offers a superior user experience compared to Flickr but - surprisingly! - they charge a lot for storage space exceeding 1Gb. You should also notice that using Picasa requires a software download and installation. Through a completely web based FlickrPro account, you get unlimited storage for your photos.

A very real catch about Flickr is if you are truly a pro photographer working with huge RAW images. They might take ages to upload and retrieve, if Flickr supports them in the first place (I think not). However, considering how fast the bandwith available to everyone increases all the time, this might be a non-issue in a year or two. Anther hole in the Flickr package is the absence of a batch download feature, in case you'd like to retrieve all of your photos in one sweep. Luckily, there is free software like FlickrDown available that does that very nicely.

Oops, I've been rambling ever so slightly - I do have some photos to share! Just follow this public Flickr link. Problems viewing the material? Please let me know and I'll do my best to help!
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Posted by: Niilo Alhovaara, Tunaskolan Luleå Sweden
Email: niilo.a@gmail.com
Skype: niilo.a

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In the last workshop today, the participants of the eTwinning and Educational Resources-workshop created a "window wiki" as an exercise to get used to the idea of collaborative tagging.

We asked everyone to write a word on a post-it that they associated with the building where the eTwinning conference takes place. What came out is our collective thinking and understanding about the building. Hans grouped the terms in the post-its, it also reflects different clusters that the participants formed.

Interesting? This is the same idea that users do when they do collaborative tagging of learning resources in the LRE portal!

Links:

The slides from both Riina and Hans are available through Slideshare, http://www.slideshare.net/tag/etwinning

Even before you will be invited to test the MELT portal for yourself, you can check out some "travel well" learning resources here: http://del.icio.us/tag/travelwell.

Here is the video about social bookmarking, now with subtitles in different languages!

The "travel well" survey that Riina talked about it here.

Posted by Riina Vuorikari, EUN office

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Petru Dumitru introduced the workshop be giving definitions of culture values and social organisation. He talked about barriers for intercultural communication.

There are different kind of opportunities to bring intercultural learning in the school. Teachers from different countries presented their way of intercultural learning.
This is Petru Dumitru's reaction:
Download file

Peter Rasmussen from Denmark presented Springday 2008. Springday gives teachers the opportunity to work with ready made activities for intercultural dialogue. www.springday2008.net
Click to see Peter's reaction
Download file

Marleen Spierings from the Netherlands presented My Europe. http://myeurope.eun.org . This project is focused on citizenship. Thanks to My Europe, Marleen in her students got knowlodge about eastern Europe.
Click to see Marleen's reaction:
Download file

Stamatios Papadakis from Greece presented ‘50 years together in diversity’. This competition gives students the opportunity to be united.
Click to see Stamatios's reaction:
Download file

Ylva Guntsch-Malmhav from Sweden presented their project ‘Faces of Energy’. 3 weeks without energy gave X the inspiration to start a project about energy. They produced an eTwinning webmagazine with different countries.
Click here to see Ylva's reaction:
Download file

Lidia Minza from Romania presented her project‘Future Energia Project ‘www.futurenergia.org.
This project deals with the main enemy in our days, pollutions and waste materials.
Click here to see Lidia's reaction
Download file

Andreea Silter from Romania talked about ‘Learning objects’. A modern method to experience other cultures from a early age.
Click here to see Andreea's reaction
Download file

Viljenka Savli from Slovenia presented the project ‘Face to Face’. They used faces made of hand, socks etc. express different feelings. Many countries participate in this project.
See Viljenka's reaction:
Download file

Teachers reaction:
Download file

Posted by Marjolein Mennes (NSS Netherlands) and Jan Oosterhuis, eTwinning Ambassador - The Netherlands

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Friday and Saturday of the second March weekend all etwinning collectives have an opportunity to meet with the best realised school projects in Europe. After the Friday party we know the winners and runners-up in three age categories and Math and Science category.
At the workshop we saw the variety of approches to the real cooperation between schools. In the first age category 4-10 years pupils it was project My town your town primary School, UNITED KINGDOM and
CEIP Virxe da Luz, SPAIN. They have very similar idea as many other partnership – know each other better, to show some cultural typical events and customs. What was different – great enthusiasm, great motivation, very good planning phase where children can decide and choose what they prefer and cooperation with parents. Teachers spoke about their common work and use various technical tools, but very simple suitable for beginners. They prepared many materilas and very nice Calendar of events.

The second category 11-14 years old pupils won partnership of Sweden and Germany schools. Two wooden dolls project was very original way how to help children from migrants groups to join to their new homes and communities. Dolls were made by children and illustrated two nationalities who find their place in new life ,new situations. It was project focused on playing and telling stories and children used animation tools, very intensive collaborative methods. Really interesting for everybody who works with migrants and minorities in the classroom.

The third category 15-19 years was represent by the French,Belgium and Italy schools in the project Planete @dos
which connected students from different environment by technical tools like podcasting, videoconference , blogs, creating stories tohgether.

All these projects brought the most important feature – children learned everyday things very differenta and amazing way. They are very interesting about project work and they have great motivation for study and cooperation. Etwinning have the great chance for the future!
Gabriela Podolanová,NSS Slovakia, gabriela.podolanova@etwinning.sk

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This morning I attended a great session on using different free tools for eTwinning presented by John Warwick, Thomas Maier and Christian Komonen.

John pictured above showed us how easy it is to video-conference using Flashmeeting, a webcam and a computer. He explained how teachers can use the tool to network with each other as well as help their pupils share ideas with their partner school. He then went on to describe other features such as being able to record conversations including text chats and having a presentation mode which lets users share images with each other during meetings.

Christian then went on to tell us about the tool Magazine Factory which lets you create an e-magazine either as an individual school or as a collaboration between schools. He also showed us how to embed YouTube videos and Google Maps into the magazine which was cool.

Finally, Thomas talked about blogging and podcasting from definitions to practical examples, prompting us to think of the possibilities of using such tools for personalised and distance learning. Each talk was delivered with enthusiasm and was very "teacher friendly".

I particularly liked John's slide with the message: "Technology is just a tool, nothing more or less"

In other words, as teachers we need to concentrate on how to use tools like these to facilitate good learning not just be interested in using technology for the sake of it. I for one, was certainly persuaded by the effectiveness of using these tools for eTwinning and I can see how they could be very useful in maintaining good links with other schools around Europe and further a field. Thanks to John, Christian and Thomas for their inspiration.

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EXHIBIT in the 13th floor of the Rin Grand Hotel
The colourful stands from the different countries presented cakes, drinks, students` outcomes, docummentaries on their collaborative work. A good opportunity to get to know highly motivated, hard working teachers from other countries interested in creating classes with common work across Europe.
Here we are, the Portuguese Team getting their stand ready with our best quality projects, our Port and Madeira wines, traditional cakes from all over Portugal, green olives, pens, brochures and other items representing cities, boroughs, namely balloons from Marvila.
Teresa Fernandes, Teacher of English and German, D.Dinis Secondary School, Lisbon, Portugal
acrossbiblept@gmail.com

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Intercultural understanding in eTwinning – Workshop session, Bucharest, 15th March 2008

Posted by: Lukasz Kluszczyk, eTwinning Ambassador, teacher from ZS Nr3 secondary School in Jaslo, Poland

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This headline tells all about what you could learn if you participated in the workshop �eTwinning & Tools� at the eTwinning conference.
With professor Sugata Mitra’s lecture in our minds we were very open to hear about tools for collaboration.
When you have an eTwinning project it is possible for you to use some external tools:

• Videoconferencing with FlashMeeting
• Magazine Factory – a tool for making web-magazines
• Blogs and podcasting

Click on the link below the picture to read the rest of the post.

http://www.etwinning.net

Posted by: John Kraaer NSS Denmark

All the tools offer possibilities for communication and collaboration. FlashMeeting is a communication tool developed by the Open University in eEngland – video conferencing is communication and live interaction. John Warwick’s showed some examples where the tool was used both by teachers planning a project and by students collaborating about a project.
Along with the video conference there is also a presentation tool and a chat function. Read more about Flashmeeting at http://flashmeeting.e2bn.net.

Christian Komonen showed the features in Magazine Factory.
Magazine Factory is a tool for producing web-magazines. It has a very easy to use editor. You can either make a single user magazine or a collaborative version where teachers and pupils from different schools and countries produce the web-magazine collaboratively.
It is possible to embed YouTube videos and Google Maps in your magazine.
Read more about Magazine Factory at www.edu.fi/magazinefactory. If you want to start using Magazine Factory contact Thomas Maier at Thomas.maier@eun.org.

Thomas Maier made a presentation about blogs and podcasting. There are 35000 blogs with educational content and the number is still growing.
A blog is like a journal where you can write what you do each day. http://blog.eun.org/watercrosswords or http://blog.eun.org/musica or http://blog.eun.org/abbeyroad are some examples. It is possible for others to comment on the content.
If you want to get a blog you can either download your own server software or use a public blog service – it is free and no maintenance, but you may have to put up with advertisements.
You can also contact the CSS (Thomas Maier) who will set up a blog for you. You get one administrator account and 2 or 3 student accounts.
Podcast – you do not need an iPod to listen to a podcast – any mp3-player can be used.
The idea of podcasting is that when you have found the services you want to follow it is possible to subscribe to it. After this you will automatically receive new podcasts when they are published. Your podcasts will appear in your podcast software - for instance iTunes.
Read more about all these and other tools at www.etwinning.net -and choose “Tools�

Posted by: John Kraaer NSS Denmark

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Workshop session: Strand 4 - Your eTwinning.
Session 1: The eTwinning Portal. Presenters Christina Crawley and Santi Scimeca indicated that it is intended to redesign the eTwinning platform during this year and the focus of this session was twofold: to get feedback from participants on their view of the current eTwinning platform and to introduce and get feedback on some of the planned features of the new eTwinning platform.

Feedback from participants on the current platform:
Portal: Negative feedback included difficulty in finding your national support service, difficulty in finding answers to FAQs. TwinSpace should be more prominent, a CDROM user guide might be useful, online help and support should be more prominent. A “remember my password� feature for login to TwinSpace would be very useful.

Desktop Tools: Which tools do you use most? Mailbox, TwinSpace, TwinFinder, Least use? Chat, Progress Card. Difficult to use - TwinFinder. Which tools would you like included? Wiki. Simple directions as to use. Gallery of pictures with an index.

Twinspace: Many prefer to use personal email. Calendar not much used. Forum used a little, should be an alert to inform you when someone posts. Chat not much used. Uploading documents difficult to do at start. Easy when you learn!

The New Platform will include a “Welcome to eTwinning� for newcomers and a “What is Going On� window for news and project information.
It will be possible to browse schools, people, projects, by subject, country, school categories. If you choose a country you will see a country page. This will contain a
map of registered schools, a featured project, lists of all schools registered, all projects registered, national support service, interviews with teachers.

New desktop elements will include My Groups - for discussions on subject, ICTs. This will allow people to get together, create their own groups which may eventually result in a project. The redesign will stress and increase social networking aspects and opportunities.

New richer user profile pages are planned. These will include My Projects. My Project Ideas, My Awards. There will be a rating feature which will be called something else. This rating will be based on how active the teacher has been on eTwinning, how many times they log in etc.

New TwinSpace Home.
This will have a richer window with sections for partners with pictures, a description of the project. This is the public page of the project and public files from the project will be available here. It will have a guest book. A Twin Blog feature will replace the Progress Card.

Participants gave some feed back on the new portal - time was limited by this stage. Coffee was calling!

Everyone like the new visuals, interactive map. Suggested that “What is eTwinning� be highlighted. Welcome for the TwinBlog idea. Some questions about the rating system. If new users have only one star it is possible that this will mean that few people will contact them. Most p