Students' experiences: eTwinning, Comenius.. and lasting on-line friendship



Lucrezia Frati - Martina Spedale
students at Liceo Psicopedagogico

 Hello everybody, I'm Lucrezia from Italy.
My European experience has been with eTwinning, in Lower Secondary School.
I think first of all eTwinning has allowed us all to find a school to work with: our Partner Country was Hungary, for the children of other classes the Partner Countries were Spain, Slovakia and Turkey, in previous years there were the Czech Republic, Cyprus, and many others.
We can say that in the last six years, our city has been traveling all the time throughout Europe with eTwinning!
If I were to give a reason why to try eTwinning, I'd say it's fun, it is never boring, and you meet new people and new places.
In our project, "BE TWIN", we worked in pairs with the Hungarian students. In a sense, eTwinning made us feel the subjects we studied as "new" and more engaging; instead of the "normal" lesson, we could use new programs, write on the internet, chat and meet people from other countries.
We also created a facebook page to go on meeting with our partners.
The best part, of course, was to meet them in person.
I think eTwinning for me is also a way to fight shyness, because it teaches us how to speak in foreign languages​​ with people who otherwise we would never have known. We learn not be afraid to turn to someone new, even when it is very far from us.

And then eTwinning is also a way to learn to fend for yourself and solve problems without always going to the teacher, using the computer, your partners' help, and foreign languages​​. If there is a difficulty, no drama, just work hard... and have fun!

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I'm Martina from Italy and I took part in the same project as Lucrezia. We were in the same class in Lower Secondary school and we are together also in "Liceo" as we chose the same High School. I hope we'll have European adventures here too.
One thing I liked in eTwinning is the use of new technologies, working in groups. Three years ago we were already pretty familiar with computers, but then we improved a lot. All the work we did was based on the use of computers in an imaginative and original way. This can be useful to make lessons more enjoyable every day and learn faster.
Our Hungarian partners also won an award for the use of the digital whiteboard.
For us the Municipality, also thanks to our commitment to eTwinning, has managed to create a beautiful and efficient new school, with digital boards in every classroom. This happened because the Mayor has realized and appreciated what we were doing: we had so many contacts in Europe, so we needed appropriate technologies.
My partner in the project was Edit, and we still are friends, we met in October in person, and we meet almost every day on facebook. So, thanks eTwinning!

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Orsolya Csebella

Hello everybody, I'm Orsolya from Hungary. Together with other students who chose to study Italian at the István Orczy Általános Iskola of Szeged, Hungary. I took part in many eTwinning projects. The one I like most is "BE TWIN – twinning up the everyday lesson”.

In the project’s activities, we used lots of web tools. I liked PhotoFunia for example, to edit photos in a fun way, and Voki to create speaking avatars.

We all have a Twin. My Twin is Lule, Lucrezia.

We wrote letters to each other, created poems and drawings, worked together on google docs, and had fun! Now, after more than three years, we still go on meeting, on eTwinning and on facebook.

My favourite activity was when we wrote a poem together on Friendship. We Hungarians wrote the first part of the poem, and our Italian friends had to finish them.

Thank to the project, we could go the Tiszafüred and Eger camp in Hungary to try out lots of innovative web tools. Later we were invited with our Twins to the Budapest conference. It was very nice to meet and get to know each other in person. We met again last fall when we visited Italy in a Comenius project. I liked meeting Lucrezia and the others again, and spending some time together. I hope I’ll be able to travel again in the future. And I want to go on studying languages.

Hooray for Comenius and eTwinning because that's how we met our friends!