eTwinning – a platform that gathered us, SWOT VET partners, in circumstances which wouldn’t connect us in any other possible way. Being happy to collaborate and proud on hard work our students have done, of course we joined international celebration of eTwinning Day on May 9th. Not only it was eTwinning Day, it was also Europe Day which is marked on the same day the European Union was born.
During these challenging times which don’t leave much options for international collaboration of schools, eTwinning is a saver. Maybe we cannot implement Erasmus+ projects, maybe we are not able to travel from country to country and meet each other face to face, but we can collaborate virtually with ease due to eTwinning. eTwinning is online platform for educational organizations of various types. Along with its “sister platform” Twinspace, eTwinning offers various channels of communication – there you can have your personal or your school can have official profile, you can communicate through posts, messages, chats, videocalls and it is possible to exchange different types of documents with your colleagues. Also, it is a place where most of the Erasmus+ partnerships start.
Celebrating eTwinning Day was just one part of much bigger event – Europe Day. It is marked on May 9th since on that day Robert Schuman, former French foreign minister, in 1950 presented The Schuman Declaration. That document proposed creation of European Coal and Steel Community, whose members would work together on coal and steel production. Founding members were Italy, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and West Germany. After some time, the organization grew and we know it today as – European Union.
Fast forward to nowadays – eTwinning allows access to members from whole Europe, regardless if they are not EU members. Partners search and find each others there according to interests and age of their students. That is how we started to work together – we saw a need to enhance our vocational programs and decided to join eTwinning project created by one Turkish school. For celebration of eTwinning Day, each partnering school created virtual tour through our eTwinning experiences via Emaze application. These are collections of most important and most joyful moments of our cooperation by now. Also, on the same day, teachers and students participating in the project joined Twinspace from warmth of their homes just to get to know each other better, without thinking of upcoming tasks and outside of their classrooms.
Below we share each and every of our virtual tours, so feel free to check them out.