Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter no. 5 - July 2015 | Page 7

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2015 Newsletter -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------am proud and happy to be part of this remarkable network of pioneering teachers. Mobility for learning is a great way to enrich teachers’ work, to ignite a novel enthusiasm in themselves and their students, and an incentive for more creative endeavours. It is a marvellous manner of improving the quality of education ultimately. I am very satisfied with the quality of the course at ETI, the acquired skills, the making of new friends – with these teachers from different countries I hope my school will establish long-term cooperation in the form of joint partnership projects. Thank you, Erasmus+! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “The character project: educating the heart” – An experience of key competences in eTwinning by Cinzia Masia Over the years one of the most important aims of the school systems has become the opportunity to offer students chances to improve their knowledge and competences but also to become responsible citizens and efficient workforce in a more and more challenging world. In 1996 Jacque Delors and the European Commission exploited the term Learning in order to stimulate reflection on major educational questions in the 21st century. Throughout the Four Pillars of Learning (Learning to Know, Learning to do, Learning to be and Learning to Live together) they stressed the importance of putting knowledge and learning into practice developing skills and then competences together with personal attitudes and qualities knowing and understanding other people. Competence has become a key word and the concept of 'key competences' has gained importance in recent years particularly at school level. In order to create an appropriate learning environment to help students to build up their competences it is important to rearrange national curricula. Teachers should work together to think about new interactive strategies so to involve students actively while exploiting their own knowledge and practicing their competences together with life skills, personal qualities, capabilities and attitude. Then, according to the European Framework of 8 Key Competences (2006), several European schools have rearranged and updated their national school curricula. In Italy numerous schools have started reorganising their own curricula trying to establishing competences to be developed through proper methods and approaches in interactive learning situations useful to prepare students. This has become one of the main aims of my school and subsequently last school year we decided to plan cross-curricular Teaching Units in order to create collaborative and multidisciplinary activities exploiting different key competences at the same time since of their co-dependent characteristics. So eTwinning platform offered the right chance to plan and carry out such activities motivating and involving our learners. Among a large amount of project proposals, I believed that the eTwinning project named “The Character project: educating the heart” was the proper one because of its topic and aims settled to help students to reflect on their own characters respecting the others. “… How can we create a compassionate, caring school environment? How can we awaken the passion for learning in students? How can we promote kindness in the classroom? How can we inspire purpose, reach students’ hearts, and cultivate student security, identity, and belonging?…” With some of my colleagues we decided to adopt these questions as starting points for our multidisciplinary project mainly based on the development of some Key competences such as Communication in mother tongue, Communication in foreign language, Social and civic compete