Our project won the prize for the best eTwinning project in the UK, 2015. We hope that it will be used in the future as an example of best practice in online project work.
The assessor’s comments included:
“fully collaborative and delivering motivating active-learning actions throughout; immaculately planned, delivered and recorded on the twin space to an extremely high standard; use of innovative technologies to ensure full partner participation and engagement is outstanding; the legacy materials generated provide a wonderful resource for others to use; a most impressive and exemplary eTwinning project.”
The project was listed in the top 10 projects for 2014-15 in Estonia. The judges commented:
"The project "Christmas Truce" is very original. There are many Christmas projects every year but this project is quite different. The project "Christmas Truce has another point of view. Children shared Christmas peace singing "Silent night", sending cards and studying history."
In particular, we think it could be used as a model for international school work where the project benefits from the inputs from a number of different countries. The perspective and depth gained from these reflections broaden and deepen this kind of project. The whole is much more than the sum of the parts.
We are particularly keen to encourage other teachers to use the technology of video calling with other schools, to enable pupils to learn from their peers.
The use of Scratch programming was successfully used within the project, which gave the pupils a real audience – around Europe – for their messages.
I talked about the project at the British Council’s conference for UK eTwinning Ambassadors, in Manchester, March 2015, in my workhop on the use of video-calling in the classroom.
I am also mentoring a group of teachers from our local cluster of 12 schools in the use of eTwinning and IT within the primary curriculum. As part of a joint project last year, we held skype calls between our local schools, and one of the schools held a call with a Greek school. A further joint project is planned for this term, also to include video-calling.