DLAB2 Changemakers is an Erasmus KA2 project in which eTwinning plays an important role. eTwinning is an online community for schools in Europe and facilitates communication, collaboration, project development, language and ICT competences. From the start, we have decided to include eTwinning because we thought the philosophy and the way of working in eTwinning matched perfectly with our goals in the project. Moreover, some of the founding members of DLAB have been involved in the eTwinning pilot for Teacher Training Institutes. As we have different TTI’s on board in the DLAB project, we decided to use eTwinning intensively. It is important that our teacher trainees in the project know about eTwinning and create eTwinning projects themselves as future teachers. Teachers, lecturers and students got very familiar with the tool in the course of the three years of the project meeting the goals of IO2. All participants were registered and got members of the eTwinning projects each year, with the support of eTwinning ambassadors Hilde Øen (Ostfold University College – Norway) and Frederik De Laere (Howest – Belgium).
In the DLAB2 Changemakers project, we created a separate project for each year. The focus of each DLAB year was different and the activities were created and realized according to the different themes.
The twinspace of an eTwinning project is the place where interaction and collaboration takes place and where materials can be shared which were used in the project activities: photos, videos, planning documents, links, time schedules, templates and other relevant documents. It is a safe platform visible only to the participants in the project. Teachers can invite the pupils to be part of the project and the Twinspace to meet and collaborate with peers from their partner schools.
On the twinspace, participants can store, organize, correct and share documents and information (such as text documents, images, news, etc.) easily, with no paperwork and made accessible at all times and from any place: something which is hard to imagine in a traditional educational context.
The twinspace has the following headings/rubrics: home, pages, materials, forum, online meetings and members.
On the home page, a short description of the project is followed by a blog on which participants can add new posts with text, photos, videos, presentations…
In the pages section, descriptions of activities and planning documents can be added and in this way it is easy to get an overview of the things that have happened in the project.
In the materials section photos, videos, files can be added and organized in folders.
On the forum, discussions can take place.
In the online meetings session, these meetings can be held and there is also a chatroom.
In the members section, all members in the project are visible and pupils can be added by teachers and be given an account that they can use to login.