2. TECHNO-PEDAGOGIC CONTENT KNOWLEDGE
ANALYSIS – MATHEMATICS
UNIT III – NETWORKING AS A MEANS OF PERSONAL AND
PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
TOPIC : CONCEPT OF E TWINNING FOR INSTITUTIONAL/
PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
INTRODUCTION
The e-Twinning action was launched in January 2005. Its main objectives complied
with the decision by the Barcelona European Council in March 2002 to promote school
twinning as an opportunity for all students to learn and practice ICT skills and to
promote awareness of the multicultural European model of society. More than 13000
schools were involved in e-Twinning within its first year. In fall 2008, over 50000
teachers and 4000 projects have been registered, while a new e-Twinning platform was
launched. In early 2009 the e Twinning motto has changed from "School partnerships in
Europe" to "The community for schools in Europe".
e-Twinning
The e-Twinning action is an initiative of the European Commission that aims to
encourage European schools to collaborate using Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) by providing the necessary infrastructure (online tools, services,
support). Therefore, teachers registered in the e Twinning action are enabled to form
partnerships and develop collaborative, pedagogical school projects in any subject area
with the sole requirements to employ ICT to develop their project and collaborate with
teachers from other European countries (at least two teachers from two different
European countries are needed). The primary workspace for the e-Twinning action, is
the e-Twinning Portal (www.etwinning.net) and it is available in twenty five languages.
Teachers registered in the e-Twinning action, also called e-Twinners , find each other,
communicate, share resources and collaborate through the e-Twinning platform. This
3. growing and active community enforced the change in the motto of e-Twinning from
"School partnerships in Europe" to "The community for schools in Europe ".
OPERATION
The main concept behind e-Twinning is that schools are paired with another school
elsewhere in the Europe and they collaboratively develop a project, also known as e-
Twinning project . The two schools then communicate using the Internet (for example,
by email or video conferencing) to collaborate, share and learn from each other. E-
Twinning encourages and develops ICT skills as the main activities inherently use
information technology. Being 'twinned' with a foreign school also encourages cross
cultural exchanges of knowledge, fosters students' intercultural awareness, and
improves their communication skills. E-Twinning projects last for any length of time
ranging from only a week, to months, up to creating permanent relationships between
schools. Schools (both primary and secondary) within the European Union member
states can participate in the e-Twinning project, in addition to schools from Turkey ,
Norway and Iceland . In contrast with other European programmes, such as the
Comenius programme, all communication is held via the internet and therefore there is
no need for grants. Along the same lines, face to face meetings between partners
schools are not required, though they are not prohibited and some schools organise
face to face meetings. European schoolnet has been granted the role of Central Support
Service (CSS) at European level. E-Twinning is also supported by a network of National
Support Services (NSS).
e-Twinning Groups are private platforms for e-Twinners to discuss and work
together on a specific topic or theme. Moderated by an experienced e-
Twinner, each Group sets out activities and tasks for teachers to do and
discuss. Topics vary from languages teaching and collaborative writing to
experimental sciences. The aim is for e-Twinners to share practice examples,
discuss teaching and learning methodologies and find support for
professional development.
Collaboration and e-Twinning
Collaboration is an important factor in the scope of school development
since it gives more space for independent and Self responsible learning.
Collaborative learning is a method for changing organizational, pedagogical
and individual processes. Consequently, like all changes when starting
collaborative working it will take more time in the early stages. In order to
implement collaboration in schools, teachers should experience for themselves what
collaborative learning means and how they can mutually benefit from it. Only if they are
convinced of this way of working method, they will be able to use it successfully in their
lessons. This needs some time to be spent in training and in experiencing collaborative
4. working. Collaborative learning allows one to look over the rim of the tea cup, to see
different possibilities and solutions: it opens and broadens the mind. Thus, collaboration
is the basic format for any kind of partnership. E-Twinning by itself means collaborative
working since at least two teachers and at least two pupils work together on the same
subject so that e-Twinning provides a framework for training and implementing playful
and authentically collaborative learning into the everyday school
ICT use
While the community tools available to the teachers involved in an e-Twinning
partnership are more than adequate for planning and executing a collaborative project,
there will be some teachers who may seek to use more pedagogically advanced
Learning Environments. That facilitate collaborative learning, most of them are built on
the constructivist idea of teaching and learning.
One of the main objectives for e-Twinning is to promote the use of modern
information and communication technologies (ICT) in education. By using email,
webpages, blogs and vlogs, video conferencing and internet, etc, the students’ and
teachers’ ICT skills will be developed and used in a relevant and natural way. So far,
European collaborative projects have been carried out by some schools by visiting each
other, writing letters and sending photographs. ICT provides an inexhaustible variety of
ways to structures and perform a collaborative project with professional and rewarding
results that speed up letter writing and the sending of photographs and make face to
face visits more rewarding and worthwhile by the ease with which the visit can be
planned and extending the contact afterward easily.
Professional development of teachers
An important side effect of an e-Twinning project can be the implicit professional
development of the teachers involved. By sharing knowledge with others and
cooperating, discussing and working towards set goals teachers are indeed stimulated.
Many report their satisfaction from this kind of collaboration and the learning effect they
experienced. There are many levels and areas of teacher professional development
possibilities in e-Twinning. Even in school cooperation can be new to the teachers who
are used to work in isolation, ‘behind the classroom doors’. A multidisciplinary project
stimulates professional discussion and cooperation among local teachers.
Schools
Authentic learning, content
• e-Twinning will bring international projects and cooperation into daily practice.
• It could have a major effect on school policy towards the teaching of certain aspects
of the curriculum.
• It delivers realistic contents and students are more curious to learn.Thus, the learning
quality in schools is enhanced.
5. Future development
Under the various measures considered above, it is clear that what can be considered
as an emblematic e-Twinning school has been highly successful in relation to attaining a
number of the objectives originally set for the e-Twinning action. It can be further
considered that the action itself has captured the imagination of teachers across Europe
and that it can be expected to continue to grow at least at the pace it has grown over
the past two to three years. Consequently, a number of observations in relation to the
findings of the study may be made regarding some possible future developments that
can assist the action and perhaps extend the positive experiences of the case note
schools to a wider group.
CONCLUSION
e-Twinning is a professional development network for European school teachers and
has been aimed to promote European teachers' collaboration through the use of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). As of November of 2010, 163,330
teachers from 35 countries have registered in eTwinning and involved in 19,128
projects. However, alone from the statistics we cannot say that a teacher is active or
develops his/her project cooperation skills well according to the project number he/she
has. Every e-Twinner in e-TwinningPoris a school teacher and is a learner at the same
time, because they want to develop their professional skills. At promoting e-Twinning
Portal to more European teachers, e-Twinning management staffs at European
Schoolnet are highly interested in teachers' progress with the help of e-Twinning Portal.
In order to recognize teachers' performance in project cooperation, additional values
such as "Quality Label" and "European e-Twinning Prizes" are applied to assess
teachers' achievements within e-Twinning.
REFERENCE
1. ACOT (2008).Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow Today.Learning in the 21st Century.
Retrieved from:
http://images.apple.com/education/docs/leaders/AppleACOTWhitepaper.pdf
2. http://insight.eun.org/shared/data/pdf/impact_study.pdf .
3. eTwinning Wikipedia .com
