eTwinning Celebration

Celebrating what unites us in the last 20 years, thanks to the platform, this school year eTwinning focuses on citizenship education, with an emphasis on active citizenship, critical thinking and learning about the EU and its values.

My idea for the project as a co-founder with the Greek PE Teacher I. Dimopoulou (Kambos Junior High School, Island of Chios, Greece) was to share Greek and Italian daily life and culture dealing with water, that is to say to practice English language (Globish) in a real communicative task, overthrowing space and time borders.

The main aim of the project is to foreground the relevance of interculture as the real value in communication.

This good practice can make the pupils aware of equality and justice concepts in a fair social virtual context. It is banded every kind of exoticism or stigmatizing of what is different or far and it is on the contrary possible to make them be enriched and fulfilled with the new and the stranger.

Etwinning engages all peers and gives the chance to foreign ss to understand that all stories of different backgrounds welcome them. It fosters their selfconfidence and helps them to feel supported too. We build bridges this way and make strong connections: our ss can practice strategies to put their voice and practical tools to express their believes and feelings, filling cultural gaps.

We can empower emphaty too and contribute to change society through togetherness and interculture more.

New technologies can eventually help the students with special needs feel the same as the others, thanks to the lack of the usual paper writing and reading practice where decoding is basic. They are a familiar favourite current way, indeed, of communicating for all cognitive styles and grants the advantage of enjoying their studies instead of getting bored and sometimes even oppositional to them.

CLIL is indeed protagonist and meaningful in every step of the path, in connecting different topics and subjects easily and clearly to pupils: this didactical feature represents an opportunity for all the teachers in and outside the project, to cooperate and give always new contributes, ideas and inspiration to each others.

To celebrate the 20th eTwinning Anniversary, eventually, we have joined a contest within 28th February, to introduce the previously explained project in a class of ours in our little town and share it on the net.

This moment of dissemination at school was relevant too, in order to make our students, our families with all community.

Marta Veglio

IC Finale Ligure (Savona, ITALY)