eTwinning UK

Spring Day 2008

Spring Day for Europe is an annual event that encourages schools to book one or many days in their calendar to organise events that focus on debate, interaction and reflection on European themes. Spring Day for Europe is an opportunity for young people to express their views and make their voices heard in Europe. It will run from the 25 March to 30 June 2008.

Now in its sixth year, the main goal of the campaign in 2008 is to prepare and assist schools in planning, organising and running their own events as part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. A wide range of activities and events are expected to take place at local, national and European level.

Click here to find out more about the great activities and competions.

Annual eTwinning Conference 2008!

The UK NSS team and 20 UK eTwinning ambassadors attended the Annual eTwinning Conference 2008 in Bucharest from 14-16th March 2008.  The theme for the conference was intercultural dialogue and the participants enjoyed a range of workshops including sessions on eTwinning tools, Intercultural understanding through eTwinning and eTwinning with educational resources!

A highlight for many was the inspirational talk from the keynote speaker, Professor Sugata Mitra from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.  His speech on the use of ICT development and his experimental approach to this within his home country of India left a lasting impression on the audience.

For more information and photos from the conference please click

UK Schools win top prize at eTwinning Annual Conference

Congratulations to Sue Burgon (left), Susie Arnott and the eTwinning pupils at

Backworth Park Primary School. They and their Spanish partner school beat off stiff competition to scope first prize at the prestigious eTwinning Annual Conference in the category aged 4-10.

The awards ceremony was held on Friday14th March. The Romanian State Secretary from the Minister of Education, Zvetlana Ileana Preoteasa presented Sue and her partner teacher Aurora Gay with their certificates and a prize trip to attend an eTwinning summer camp for both schools involved. Their project ‘Our Town, Your Town. Our Lives in a Calendar’

set out to examine the similarities between the culture in Spain and the UK looking at such things as costumes, folklore, significant dates in the year, food habits and more. The jury said

‘... a nice neat project with simple objectives, and easily obtainable results. The pupils really seemed to enjoy it’.

Teacher Kiki Haines (middle) and her pupils at Eastbourne Comprehensive also received the runner-up prize in the Maths and Science category for their project ‘Draw me the Task’. Eastbourne Comprehensive partnered with schools from Poland, Czech Republic and Norway. The project aim was to adopt a fun approach to teaching basic mathematic concepts to younger pupils. 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’.

There were a grand total of 413 entries from 29 European countries and all were subject to a strict selection process. The criteria for evaluation were…

• Pedagogical Innovation and Curricular Integration: how the project and the use of ICT change the daily life of the partner schools and fit in with national policies and exam constraints
• Collaboration Between Partner Schools: how teachers and pupils communicate in order to work together
• Creative Use of ICT: how to get beyond emailing
• Sustainability and Transferability: how to guarantee that the project will last, involving the whole school and be able to share benefits with others
• Results and Benefits: what came out of the project as well as why the project

Elluminate - Another tool for linking lots of remote locations – LIVE! - Val Brooks

I’ve only recently joined the etwinning ambassadors but am really excited with the possibilities of helping schools engage in the chance of some more really exciting projects with the assistance of some of the tools I have experienced.

I have often used Flashmeeting which has been a great way of connecting people live, but because of it offering even more collaborative features, the main tool I have been using for the last four years is a proprietary product called Elluminate (www.elluminate.com). This, like Flashmeeting, is secure webconferencing software which allows live remote connections over the internet (even on a dial-up connection) and has the ‘usual’ features of voice, text and webcam but also includes many other collaborative features such as:

• Shared, interactive whiteboard allowing participants to record and save contributions to discussions
• Sharing of applications; for example: being able to share a Word document from one machine which can be edited by someone on another machine, or being able to demonstrate a piece of software without participants having it installed on their own machine
• Transferring of files between participants
• Multimedia files can be shared by every participant
• Polling and quiz features
• Participants can be ‘moved’ to breakout rooms so that they can work in groups
• Text tool allows messages to be seen by everyone or can be sent ‘privately’ to individual participants
• Recording of sessions for review
• ‘Rooms’ are easily accessed but a weblink which can just be sent out to participants or put on a website – they don’t need to pre-register
• ‘Rooms’ can be set up so that the moderator or teacher has complete control by being able to give and take ‘privileges’

Elluminate offers a ‘vRoom for three’ people completely free of charge which would certainly be enough for three schools to meet remotely in a similar way to video conferencing but with all the extra tools Elluminate provides. However, with me working in Stockton City Learning Centre, we have been able to purchase ‘seats’ which has enabled us to link many schools from Stockton with schools outside of the area – and all schools who have worked on projects with us have then been able to access our Elluminate rooms completely free of charge. Some of the projects we have worked on can be seen on our Case Studies site, http://vle.stocktonclc.co.uk/course/view.php?id=6 (click 'Login as a guest'), and in one session we hosted, we had more than 215 participants logged on simultaneously!

Two main projects which I see could be used in etwinning particularly are:

1) Cars – Maths in Motion – where schools work on setting up a car for a grand prix race and then meet live online to race the cars – we have been doing this with New Zealand, Kuwait and have just got a school in Australia to join too. It also looks like we will get a school in Germany joining us too – and we would love some schools in other countries to get involved.

2) Rocks from Space – a project involving lots of schools where children investigate the solar system with the help of real scientists. The children are able to use a forum to ask questions and the scientists respond to them, and we also have live sessions when children can ask questions too – and we have previously, and hope to again this year, linked with international space scientists in Texas during National Science and Engineering week in March.

I would love to hear from anyone who might be interested in getting involved in either of these projects or any of the other ones mentioned on our Case Studies site. Do get in touch if you want to know more.

eTwinning PDW Oslo

Just returned from the eTwinning PDW in Oslo where the UK NSS took 5 of our eTwinning Ambassadors.  The aim of the workshop was to bring together ambassadors from all over Europe (there were 20 countries represented) to share experiences, learn new skills, and form new partnerships, all within the context of eTwinning.

  In keeping with Norwegian culture, a lot of the weekend was spent outdoors. To get to the workshop venue, we took a short ferry ride each morning, and it was wonderful to enjoy the fresh Oslo air and sunshine, as well as the stunning views, during our morning commute!

We had an extraordinary experience on Saturday evening, when we all wrapped up warmly and travelled by horse-drawn sleigh through the snow deep into the forest, where we sat round a roaring fire drinking hot wine. Dinner followed, in a traditional Sami tent - a kind of huge tepee with a fire in the middle. It was a magical time that we all enjoyed tremendously, and that certainly contributed to the quality of the networking during the weekend.

The weekend finished on a real high, thanks to the extremly inspiring talk given by Norwegian teacher, Inge Eidsvåg. Using no technology at all, apart from a microphone, Inge reminded us of the most crucial aspect in all of this: the important role of the teacher as the inspiration for learning, as facilitator, artist, counsellor....and as someone who can foster tolerance and understanding in a rapidly changing world.

And we still had time for a quick walk in the woods beside the worskhop venue before catching the ferry  back to Oslo, then saying goodbye to our friends before returning home, happy, enriched - both professionally and culturally - but exhausted!