Twinning reflections

What was designed as a short and simple 2 month project back in France turned out quite a challenge to carry out as planned. In October there were strikes all over France, soon after autumn vacations followed in Slovenia – it seemed that when we were at school the French partners weren't and the other way round. Then came the winter break in December and slightly before it our English class had ended. It turned out we really didn't have much time for playing.
Despite the hiccups our group mostly managed to realize the tasks set. These are some of our thoughts at the end:
It's good to connect with similarly aged students from a different country – it makes using English much more real. Students from our group generally liked the project idea, found it interesting and meaningful although not everybody managed to establish contact with a partner student.
It would have been nice, some said, if there had been more opportunities for interaction and more time devoted to a closer collaboration. Also - it would have been great if all Slovene and French students participated seriously and were quick in posting replies. eTwinning site could use some improving; simple little things like recognizing urls and hyperlinking them automatically would be nice.
As a teacher I think our participation in this project nicely showed in practice the importance of the impression you make online with your intro, creativity and responsiveness. Others judge you by what you show them. Being open, reliable and active can take you further - or at least shows a better picture ;-). Different people always view things differently – which good! We should be respectful of others and others of us.

Get creative - reuse and respect

Step 3 in our eTwinning experiment involves poster creation - showing things that matter or should matter in life using:

* Big Huge Lab's Motivator
* Listen to the walls talking graffiti image pool

Why using Listen to the walls talking images?

Because we have already been active in Listen to the Walls Talking project. We contributed over 70 new graffiti photos to the pool which now has over 900 photos from 20 different countries that are licensed with a CC license which allows reuse.:-)

Re-using these photos in our motivational posters nicely builds upon the work of others, promotes the spirit of sharing and makes the style of motivational posters coherent while it at the same time allows us to choose from a wide range of topics or upload and share graffiti of our own.

When using photos of other walls talking contributors, we credited them by a discretely written author's name + wallstalking.org or www.flickr.com/groups/wallstalking on the motivator. Text was simply added on images using Picasa.

This is what we came up with:


Nice, aren't they? We shared them with our French partners on our Twinspace - when they upload theirs, we'll vote for the best one.

Looks matter

When checking out our French partner's avatars and descriptions on our shared Twinspace, these struck some of us as a bit intimidating – but then we had a look at ours (previous post) and saw we don't look much different either. :-)

So – what does this tell us? First impression counts. People who don't know you judge you by what you tell them. So - it's definitely worth thinking before posting our intros and photos online. Things we find funny may be misunderstood by somebody else.



We wrote to the French and shared a thing or two obout our neck of the woods on their walls; about our home town Nova Gorica and The Solkan bridge; about the majestic The Postojna Cave - and a popular party place called Ambasada Gavioli; about Pipistrel light aircrafts and Planica ski jump center - the Slovene cradle of ski-jumping and ski-flying.

Dipping toes in eTwinning

This autumn we will try to connect with the French students and learn a thing or two about France.
The first things that seem to come to our mind in connection with this lovely country not so far away from us are Paris and Eiffel tower, cheese, wine, perfumes, fashion, skiing slopes, French classes at school (a funny language with complicated pronunciation ;-)), the Petzl climbing equipment, the Citroen car manufecturer, the Disneyland park, and famous people like President Sarkozy, the actor Jean Reno, the rally driver Sebastien Loeb and the prankster Remi Gaillard.
What does our informatics group look like? Meet our South Park avatars created in phase 1 of our eTwinning Things that matter project using SP Studio.

Nice, aren't we?
And this is our mechatronics group.

Opinions, faces and tags at Walls Talking

There are all sorts of faces staring from walls


and all sorts of opinions


and many many many tags



You are most welcome to check out also parts 1, 2, and 3 of this post and share your thoughts. :-)

School and love and city life at Walls Talking

Walls Talking images connected with school and school life



some that have to do with love (one way or another ;-))



and some that deal with city life



You are most welcome to check out also parts 1 and 2 of this post and share your thoughts. :-)

One Day in the Life at VSS

Finally posting our One Day in the Life contributions also in our base camp here. One Day is a really nice iEARN project documenting the lives of students from all over the globe. This year, 2 dates have been set in advance, on which students were asked to document glimpses from their daily lives. 10 November and 23 March. I gathered together our responses in this prezi. :-)

One Day in The Life at VSS TSCNG on Prezi