How it all began ...

The first time I heard of eTwinning was at a seminar in a Conference in Portugal in May 2008 for teachers of English and I really felt enthusiastic about it! The next step was to register my school in the eTwinning platform and find a suitable partner to work with. When I set the challenge to one of my classes, all the pupils were thrilled with the idea of getting in touch with young people from another country in school context and encouraged me to go on.

It all started in the previous school year (2007/2008). After writing about what I expected from an eTwinning project in the ‘Partner-Finding Forum’, messages began to appear in my email box – that was when I ‘met’ Miroslava from the Czech Republic. At first we tried to get to know each other, exchanging emails about our lives, family, careers and countries/hometowns. Later we started writing each other about what we could do together with our pupils and swapped ideas about a possible project… Then ‘Learning English together through ICT’ was born. It wasn’t complicated, neither to get to an agreement, nor to design the final project as from the beginning we knew we had similar ways of thinking and teaching J.

Our project’s main goal was to make our pupils find out new ways of learning English working with their partners on the same topics – the ones covered in the English subject, both in Portugal and the Czech Republic - using technology-based communication. After having created our partnership, we were ready to get started…

Summer was over and when we came back to school, we were all looking forward to the beginning of the school year! All pupils were eager to meet their new friends and partners from another country and I think I can say that was the most exciting time of all for them.    

For us teachers, the first two months ( September- October) seemed to have gone by extremely fast. I had to get used to the Twinspace and as soon as I felt prepared, we registered our pupils as members of the project and got their parents' permission to use personal information and photographs. Mirka was a good help at this stage as she already had  some experience with eTwinning.

The picture you see is our project logo!

Posted by: Carla Abreu