Tools for planning a project

 It's really important to share some information and discuss and decide a few basic things before you start an eTwinning project. Together with your partner(s) you should agree on 

• project goals
• pedagogical contents
• the tools you'll use
• the timetable 

Often this is done by sending a lot of emails back and forth. A more effective way is to create a common workspace for making a project plan together.
Very good tools for this is Google Docs. Google Docs offers you a space where you can share and edit a Word-document together with your project partners. You can also publish it in the net, when you've completed it. It's quite easy (and free) to use.
Google Docs is a great collaborative tool also for learning.

What's google docs and what is it for?

Google Docs

View more presentations from Wayne Highlands School District.

How to share your documents

Very often etwinning projects are about learning to know different countries and their cultures. That usually starts from presenting your own culture and country in different ways.
Students can make short videos presenting their own school. They can make slideshows to present their home town and their favourite places. They can make podcasts (or videos) of their traditional songs. They can make photo galleries or photo stories about the surrounding nature. They can prepare quizzes and questionnaires etc.
Web 2.0 provides excellent tools for sharing all kinds of digital documents for free. You can show and share what you have accomplished, not only with your partners, but with the whole school, parents, surrounding community, with the whole world, if you like.
The procedure is simple: First create an account and upload your documents to the appropriate place on the web. Then you can link or embed your documents in your blog, so that they're easy for everybody to find and watch.
For videos: YouTube or TeacherTube or Vimeo
For PowerPoints and pdf-documents and presentations: SlideShare or Authorstream or Slideboom
For photos: Flickr or Picasa
For articles and photos and for creating a web magazine: Magazinefactory

Collaborative learning on the web

To enable collaborative learning on the web these preconditions are entailed:

• the pedagogical goal and content is clear to all participants (teachers and students) - planning
• the participants have learnt to know each other and there's a trust between the partners (teachers and students) - sharing
• there's a safe environment on the web, where direct communication  and collaboration can take place

How to collaborate

It's good to remember that in an international project the participants very often communicate using a foreign language. The tasks should not require too demanding level of communication. Here are some examples of how to work together.
Learning conversations: Probably the most important way of collaborative learning and construction of knowledge. The teacher or a student writes a short introduction on a given topic or theme. The students discuss the topic sharing information, asking questions and/or solving problems. Part of this would also be commenting and giving feedback. The learning process is visible to everybody. It entails ability to communicate in foreign language (between partners).

Creating presentations collaboratively: Partners can divide work so that one partner produces a photo story, paintings, a comic strip or a video, and the other produces texts or subtitles or a report or a narration. Students can form small groups with partners from different countries and work together producing articles or presentations or a webmagazine.
Making comparisons: Partners coming from different countries and different parts of Europe can work collaboratively by comparing different aspects of their lives. They can create Wikis consisting of pages with tables comparing weather, natural phenomena, school days and holidays, local festivals, food and eating, daily habits, history, arts, architecture etc.
Creating problems, puzzles or quizzes: Students can create quizzes dealing with history, culture, politics, flora and fauna of their own country for each other. Asking good questions or presenting a problem in an interesting way is often a lot more demanding than finding the answers.
Virtual tour: Groups of students from different countries travel together virtually. Each member of the group suggests a place to visit. They divide work: one studies interesting sights, one finds informations about hotels, camping sites etc, one studies local culture and festivals etc. Then the group members share the information they have collected.

Tools for collaborative learning:

• Creating networks and communities with groups and forums: Spruz, SocialGo, Grou.ps 
• Wikis for working together and creating shared documents: Wikispaces
• Working together and sharing documents: Google groups
• Mindmapping: bubbl.Us; Mindomo; Freemind; Mindmeister
• Web meetings: Elluminate; Flashmeeting
• Web magazines: Magazinefactory
• Virtual learning environments (VLE): Moodle, Udutu; eTwinning Twinspace (freely available when you have found a partner and registered an eTwinning project). Virtual learning environments provide you with a set of tools that can be used for collaborative learning. Those usually comprise all the above mentioned tools + some more like chats, polls and questionnaires, exams, learning journals, groups, glossaries, photo galleries etc.

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Tips for Teachers as Web Tutors or Moderators

The teacher's role is crucial when planning a learning process. In an eTwinning project, it's the partner teachers' shared responsibility to schedule the learning process, choose and provide appropriate tools, set the goals and plan the procedure. After that the focus should be on the learners.

• Teacher is a guide on the path students are walking. She/he let's the students walk independently, encourages and supports, helps in crisis, but keeps distance.
• At the beginning the teachers' responsibility is bigger, but towards the end, the students should take responsibility of their own learning and of the process/project.
• When the students face problems, they should have a teacher to turn to for help. On the other hand, the students should be encouraged to first try to solve the problems themselves.
• It's important that the students help and support each other. Teaching your peers is an essential part of collaborative learning.
• One of the most common mistakes is that the emoderator/teacher talks too much and imposes her/his own ideas very strongly.
• In learning, the process is much more important than the end product.
• Mistakes are an essential part of a learning process and often a very effective way to learn. They're nothing to be afraid of.
• When given the goal and support and appropriate tools, students usually come up with amazingly creative solutions.
• Project learning is always as much learning to learn as learning the actual subject matter.