A New Look and Focus for your eTwinning Portal
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 people will contact those with a high rating. There was a query as regards the possibility of using a webcam on the new site.
- Posted by Michael Farry, teacher and ICT Advisor, Navan Education Centre, Ireland
