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Welcome to the summer edition of the eTwinning Newsletter!

Don't forget to apply for the eTwinning National Quality Label if you think your eTwinning project has

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that was new and different. Contact koregan@leargas.ie

Brenda Walsh, Convent Primary Srhoof Listowel, Co.

Kery

Stories and legends are a wonderful way to engage children and make learning enjoyable. We got involved in eTwinning through the project Wonderful Legends as a result of a PDW in Sweden. Our school has 240 pupils aged 4-!2 and is very involved in the community: the school band plays at all major local events. The other two sciiools were based in Sweden and Germany. The German school caters fsr students with special needs. Rather than just exchanging information and stories, the aim of the project was to guess each others legends while getting to know another European country. To facilitate collaboration,

the project used comprehension strategies developed as part of the Building Bridges to Understanding programme. (See www.cdu.mic.ul.ie/Newresource/default.html). lt is a relatively new whole-school approach to the teaching oJ English comprehension. The project focused on the following strategies: predicting (what will happen next?), visualising (storyboards), making connections (can they relate to the legend - e.Er. the pied piper legend), questioning and clarifying (were their predictions correct? receiving correct feedback ) and determining importance.
Students created storyboards of their legends. The participating schools received onlytwo pictures at a time to encourage their European pirtners to anticipate and predict what happened next in the legend. We used Scratch, a programming language developed by Mlt to ireate oui,ahimat*d legend and the students really enjoyed seeing their own drawings come to life. We used Skype and,the IWB which allowed students access to another country's classroom. Students were introduced to a number of ICT presentation tools. Twinspace was very beneficial for uploading pictures and videos.

Apartfromthe projectoutcomes,there have been some longer-term impact5. Scratch programmingand Building Bridgesto Understanding have continued in the school. Team teaching worked exceptionally well and both teachers, together with another colleague, now teamteach to implement the third-class literacy programme.

eTwinning Annual Conference

Brendan O' Dwyer, St Michael's Boys'School, Galway

The European Union has declared 20L3 as European Year of Citizens. How appropriate then that citizenship was the theme of the eTwinning Conference in Lisbon in March. The keynote speech
by Bob Fryer emphasised the importance of learning citizenship in

the classroom to counteract the increasing disconnect between

young people and politics and activism.

Peter Hogenbirk's and Conor Galvin's workshop on Active

Citizenship elaborated on how teaching citizenship might happen. Peter explained how he had put in place a structured approach to teaching citizenship. This involved integration into all areas of the curriculum--encouraging collaboration, and developing social competence and basic values among pupils--and facilitating pupils to reach out and engage with the wider community. Ongoing evaluation was also an important feature.

Pupils

from Convent Primory School, Listowel,

Co Kerry

Spring Campaign - Everybody is (eT)winning

The aim of the campaign is to mobilise eTwinners to promote eTwinning at their school. lt will consist of two distinct activities:

of intercultural European citizenship was emphasised. An interesting angle was that projects that tap into the value system of pupils can be very useful in promoting ln an
eTwinning context,

the

importance

understanding in developing the idea

of

Design eTwinning posters and win a HD pocket camcorder! Create a poster to promote your event and upload it to the campaign webpage. The poster should related to your eTwinning experiences, one of your projects, or you can simply use it to promote your information session. There are some great examples on the campaign page: http://www. etwin n ing. net /en/pub/news/news/etwin ning_spring_cam paign_la u n. htm Organise an eTwinning event: Promote eTwinning at school through eTwinning Breaks! Have your pupils present their project to other pupils, hold a coffee break for colleagues to talk about the project, project ideas or three things you can do in eTwinning. Once you have sent the date, you can share the details ofthe event on the map on the campaign webpage. The activity should preferably take place between L3 and 17 May. For more information, see the campaign webpage.

citizenship.

The conference was thought-provoking, and provided important insights on how citizenship might be seamlessly integrated to the classroom across all subject areas. lt has also provided stimulus for our own eTwinning project

on

Parliamentary Landmarks and

Lar onal Oevelopre'rl F an 2007 20i

Citizenship.

Lifelong Learning Programme