REFLECTION ON WEEK 5

The global collaboration project I submitted for this week’s assignment was an etwinning one designed by Claudia Corrado, from Italy, Anna Matejzcyk from Poland and me (Anthippi Harou), from Greece. Its title was ‘Fairy Tale Retellings’ and lasted about seven months. The aim of the project was to get our students collaborate in international groups to write different versions of classic fairytales all the countries had shared before.

We carried out this project in year 2016-17, and it was quite successful as we were awarded with the National and European Quality labels for that project. To me, these labels serve like badges for both the teachers and the students’ efforts in accomplishing the project goals.

I believe one of the reasons for its success lay on its planning phase. The three partner teachers set specific goals to be achieved. These goals were relevant to our students’ age, language level, needs and interests. This way the goals could be achieved by our learners. At the same time our students would have an enhanced experience through interacting with peers from other countries and they would increase their self-confidence in EFL use.

Another reason lay on the fact that the three partner teachers had built close relations even before the beginning of the project. Having a more intimate relation with a partner facilitates collaboration. This means you respect him/her and you never give up a project. Sharing, exchanging ideas and co-creating get fun and easy when you respect your partner and when you empathize with him/her. Facing challenges that may appear during the project are more easily solved when there is mutual understanding. The positive spirit of collaboration among partners impacted our students’ participation and online behaviour. It seemes we modelled the right behaviour.

As a result, all of the involved students were enthusiastically engaged in the project and obeyed netiquette rules. Even though they had their passwords and usernames and could enter the twinspace platform even at home, they always acted respectfully.