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+!
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“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