07/05/2015
#eTwinningDay: Europe celebrates the excellence of its teachers and students
More than 150 teachers and pupils are rewarded today by the European Commission to celebrate their outstanding work in developing European cooperative projects via eTwinning. The largest community for schools in Europe, eTwinning, counts over 300.000 teachers and almost 140.000 schools. Launched in 2005 as the flagship of the European Commission’s eLearning programme, it celebrates its 10th anniversary this year with the first ever annual eTwinning day on 7 May and with a full programme of online and offline activities across Europe. Thousands of exciting events and activities take place in schools to mark the day and celebrate eTwinning and its important role in shaping a European space for education and contributing to the modernisation of education systems.
The prize ceremony in Brussels brings together Ministry of Education representatives, teachers, and pupils in order to showcase excellent examples of collaborative eTwinning projects across European countries and beyond. The eTwinning winning projects are the best illustrations of how imagination, cross borders collaboration and ICT tools can transform any curriculum subject in a fun, thrilling and inspiring learning experience.
Location: Museum of Natural Sciences, 29 Rue Vautier, 1000 Brussels
Date: 7 May 2015 from 18.30 to 20.00
If you cannot join, you can follow the ceremony in real time with our web-streaming: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/etwinning-europe
eTwinning 10th anniversary website: http://blogs.eun.org/etwinning10
Winning projects
Teachers and pupils from 13 countries across Europe are attending the prize ceremony. Three main prizes, sponsored by the European Commission, will be awarded based on the age range of pupils. In addition to these, there are also special categories, divided into projects promoting cultural understanding, STEM (maths and science), history and remembrance, the main European languages, and projects involving a school from Eastern Partnership Countries.
How can we make pupils as young as 4-11 years old environmentally sensitive? Organising a photography competition, creating own animated stories about endangered animals and plants and even writing e-books about tales related to nature, such as witches and their “magic potions”, are only a few examples of the work done in the winning project powerfulnaturekingdom.et. “We've started from a famous Albert Einstein's quote that says: "Look better into nature and you will understand it better". We observed, looked, experimented and the pupils learned to take care of nature in an innovative, interactive and creative way.”
Can you see a sound? The SOUNDTRACKERS team, comprised of 12-15 year old students from Norway and Portugal, produced, recorded and edited sounds to create their own soundtrack of pictures or short animations. The idea was simple, a group created stories that had no audio and another group added sound to those films. “When students realise that someone else will see their work they care more and always try to do better. eTwinning projects give pupils the opportunity to expand their views and open their classroom to the world. They have greater motivation to study and they also learn to cooperate.”
“In eTwinning we use the real world to teach theoretical topics, in a normal class we teach the theory and try to apply it to the real world”. 16-18 year old students from Spain and Czech Republic worked on several tasks in order to discover the UNESCO World Heritage in Europe. Every member of the group had to choose one site and provide information about it to everyone else. “In this project etwinautas en las ciudades (in)visibles etwinauts in the (in)visible cities students studied a number of UNESCO World Heritage sites, but they also learned about themselves and how to communicate with each other in a language that is new to some and native to others.”
