Golden rules for successful eTwinning collaboration
In any good task or project, there must be rules to follow and fulfill to guarantee its success. Next, we list nine golden rules that will ensure the success of your eTwinning collaborative project.
- Get to know your partners: share with your partners all the necessary information, such as the number of students participating in the project, your students’ age and interests, your students’ level in foreign languages and their ICT skills.
- Create a detailed time schedule: set the starting dates for each task, mark the dates when one of the partner schools is on holidays, share it with your students, set deadlines and respect them.
- Preparatory planning leads to a successful eTwinning project: plan a meeting, introduce the project to the children and inform the parents, the colleagues and the headteacher about the specific project; add more teachers from your school to the project and form school teams; announce the beginning of the project on the school website; create Twinspace accounts for all the participants, and invite students to the Twinspace; organise mini-courses for your students on ICT tools to be used, and on how to use the Twinspace; create Twinspace tutorials for students or partners who are beginners in eTwinning (if necessary).
- Design your Twinspace carefully: create activity pages for each one of the planned tasks, add a short description for each one of the activities planned at the top of each activity page, agree with your partners about the most suitable tools for each one of the activities, and add them to your activity pages.
- Break the ice and get to know each other: have students interact as much as possible, ask them to update their Twinspace profiles by adding a short description of themselves, and a representative avatar. Ask them to leave comments on their partners’ walls, and to vote for the best Twinspace profiles. Plan chat sessions and skype meetings regularly. Find creative ways to have your students introduce themselves and their school or country.
- Team your students up in Transnational Groups: team students up in transnational groups, create a table with the newly formed transnational groups and add it to the Twinspace. Ask your students to work together and write a short description of their group members. Ask your students to also agree upon a name for their group and draw together a symbol or an emblem for each group.
- Plan as many collaborative activities as possible: try to plan activities that need your partners’ contribution to be completed. Use as many collaborative tools as possible (Google suite, DrawitLive, Glogster, etc.). Try to avoid creating folders for each country in Twinspace (successful collaborative activities are the ones in which you cannot tell which of the partners did what!).
- Assign responsibilities to your students: discover your students’ talents and skills and give them responsibilities. Team the students up in groups, according to their talents (the painting group, the photography group, the ICT group, etc.), and assign to some students the role of "student administrator" in Twinspace.
- Set Evaluation Criteria: try to evaluate the quality of your project along with your partners. Recognize Key Strengths, and identify areas that need improvement. Plan ongoing evaluation activities (share opinions, make proposals, comment on each other’s work).
These golden rules will make an eTwinning project a successful experience, since they promote collaboration between partners, PBL methodology and the change of role of the teacher and students. Remember that it is important to clearly indicate to the students what they have to do, how they must do it and when they have to do it, designing the phases of the activity very clearly. This will facilitate their autonomy and the development of skills. In these new processes, we must emphasize the fact that we have to facilitate and provide opportunities for the students to work as a team, both among them, in the classroom, and with their distant partners.
