There are people here from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Hungary, as well as a group of us from the UK. I’ve learnt new words – jinyenko (Polish for thank you – please don’t say anything about my less than perfect phonetic spelling), Svayga (Latvian for hello), Poldeeeos (Latvian for thank you). I’ve learnt a very elegant, stately Polish dance – walking with style in 3/4 time, with a longer stride and bent knee on beat one, everything straight for steps 2 and 3. We weaved our way around on our own, in pairs, in fours, diagonally crossing, making bridges with our arms for others to duck under, ending with a Mexican wave-style spin. We had a very strict dance teacher who made us practice it over and over until we had the steps perfected. Then we were put to shame by two young girls performing a much faster dance – in fact, there were steps in it that were vaguely reminiscent of a Gay Gordon, one of the few traditional dances from our own country (I’m counting our own country as being the UK and not just Scotland for the purposes of this!!!!!!) Horror of horrors, this was going to be the second dance we were taught for the afternoon!! I have to admit, I no longer feel guilty about not making it to the gym this week as I reckon this was a pretty good workout.
With barriers broken down and new friendships starting to be forged through shared embarrassment, giggling and the climate was ripe for building ideas and partnerships, for creating longer term projects that we would be able to share with and between our classes. By Sunday some of us were submitting our e-twinning projects for approval – a process that is included to ensure projects are going to be of high quality. It was certainly a great way to make contacts, but – it has to be said – not the only way.
The first step would be to visit the portal at www.etwinning.net. Have a look around the site and check it out, explore what it does. You can register without any obligation to take part in a project or submit a project, it is free and will enable the options to be explored further within the areas that become available to members in their DESKTOP area. Once you are registered, you can explore the options for projects, find potential partners and create your own -project ideas. The time-scale for any projects are subject to negotiation between you and a partner – they may take a week or two or be spread over a whole year. It’s up to you when you start – if you start – and you can be involved in more than one project at a time if you want to. Your school can be involved in as many projects as they wish, too.
The kits that are available to those registered on www.etwinning.net are an ideal starting point for those unsure of what they would like to do in a collaboration project. I like the way that, whilst this support is given, there is a lot of flexibility in how the projects are used and developed. I like the way that any project I submit can evolve and develop in a natural way during its course – because my own experiences have taught me that there needs to be a certain amount of flexibility and spontaneity in a collaboration, whilst not losing sight of the learning intentions and outcomes. I would recommend these kits to colleagues who are interested in taking part in a collaboration but would like some inspiration/ideas/a project that would appeal to partner schools, too. There are enough tools available through the twinspaces (which are set up for each project) that those without a learning platform could easily use them with their pupils, but the tools that can be used in the project are by no means limited to the twinspace tools such as forums and wikis.
So what will I be doing to follow up? Hopefully a few more blog posts about how to get involved in etwinning, how to use the site and tools, how to involve colleagues, models and theories of collaboration. I’ll be encouraging and supporting my own colleagues to incorporate some of these opportunities for their own pupils. I’ll be keeping in close touch with those I met this weekend in Gdansk. I’ll be starting an etwinning project with them from January – which we think will give us a bit of time to negotiate the finer details of the project. What have we decided to do?? Watch this space, it’s going to take a whole blog post!!!!!!!!!! Let’s just say, you’d better make yourself comfortable and then I’ll begin…….
