What is eTwinning?

eTwinning is a European school community. Its aim is to enhance cooperation of twin kindergartens, primary, middle and high schools in Europe through electronic media and promoting teachers' professional development. This is a dynamically developing secure user space (eTwinning LIVE) and project collaboration (TwinSpace).

The three most important features of the eTwinning program are:

• using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in our classrooms
• use of a foreign language in practice for direct communication with the partner school
• project related to the curriculum of subjects taught at school.

After a teacher registers the project and is is approved by the National eTwinning Offices, cooperation with partner schools takes place on TWINSPACE. It is a cooperation space, a place common to all partners, where participants can collect materials and cooperate with the use of various tools. It is a safe space - the partners working here, especially the students, can communicate with each other without fear of interference from outside. Communication tools available on the TwinSpace are: TwinMail, chat, video conference, forum. They are available only to participants registered on the TwinSpace by the teacher coordinator.

The first project at our school

This year students of CLASS I B have been participatinge in a project entitled ‘UNITED THROUGH ENGLISH’ together with a partner school from Žilina in Slovakia. The teachers coordinators of our school are Agnieszka Pobrucka and Iwona Lis. The idea of the project is to see the way teenagers in the partner countries live and study, improve our language and communicative skills as well as learn about the geographical features and tourist attractions of countries in which our schools are situated.

The project is a three-month long one. It started in October and is about to finish in December. We have been doing good job with the project, I guess. For the start, The Slovak and Polish students took some welcoming photos and wrote greeting letters to put them on TwinSpace. What's more, they have been exchanging TwinMails allowing them to get to know one another better and practise real life communication in English. So far, students have had the opportunity to have some fun with English crosswords, quizzes and puzzles. A forum thread has been started to share our likes concerning music taste. In November students of both schools were working on their presentations. It was a long and challenging process, but worth the effort put in it. The presentation is to answer the questions asked by the project partner and show our country and culture to the project partner. In the meantime, we put some information on what our students learn about the partner country during their geography lessons at school. We have also shared some news on the occasion of the yearly event called NerdNight. Now, in December it is time for last activities which are: brainstorming about how and why to learn English as well as voting for the most beautiful words in our native languages.

You can see the public mode of our project Twinspace https://twinspace.etwinning.net/46794/home and some photos attached to the text here as well.

project coordinators – Agnieszka Pobrucka and Iwona Lis