Ing. Paula Šilhárová, Slovakia

For me the only one way how to evaluate this project is to write

A "project story" about resilience

On the very beginning there was an email from my NSS - offer for eTwinning seminar about active citizenship. Perfect chance to try something new. I liked it really much. The only one thing to think about - I´m teaching economic subjects, so I wanted a project concerning my curriculum. And I found one more person with the same wish. So with french teacher we started the project about active citizenship, but for companies. I had no idea at that time how perfect this theme will be.

So we started with our activities, but ... I started to have trouble with my students with exchange we would like to realise. It was sad situation for me to inform our french partner about the situation. But ... never give up, try to find the solution. And I found it.

At the same time on Obchodná akadémia Trnava they wanted to start with eTwinning and participate our project and they wanted also to participate the exchange. Great. I came there to show them how to work in Twinspace. And the cooperation between 3 schools has started. And it goes in a good way. Students were working, we have organised a lot of events, we have learned a lot.

But ... problems with exchange were there again - now on french side. So we have continued as 2 schools from Slovakia till end of school year and we have agreed to continue next school year to finish activities we have stared in project.

Next school year - another but comes here again. Our partners from Trnava didn´t have enough time to continue in project.

Never give up, try to find the solution - I tried. I posted in Forum offer to work in our project. And fortunately I was successful. Evangelia from Greece wanted to participate. And they stared to work really like rockets. They have made all parts of project we already have done. They were so great! 

We have started also many new activities. Collaboration with them was fantastic. They are really our new friends now. During lessons we really often talk about them, my students are curious and they taught us a lot. But also personally they are such a nice people. Joy to work together. And with Evangelia we are friends now. I admire her in so many ways. We communicate together very often and I highly appreciate advantages of our cooperation, because we are teaching different subjects. This project has taught me and my students a lot about responsible companies, we have learned some new things about project work. We had fun quite often, we have organised quite a lot of events connected with this project. We are working hard to communicate in English and I encourage my students to do it. We are working a lot with ICT tools - I know some of them, my students know some of them, we try to cooperate :-D

This is happyend. We had good topic, nice project partners, great experiences.

For me as the teacher the best evaluation of project is student´s question: "Are we going to work in some eTwinning project also next year? Can we choose the topic of it?"

Thanks to my students for their work in this project and to our partners to work with us and inspire us, for sharing their experiences, ideas and enthusiasm

 

Evangelia Triantafyllou, Greece

In the beginning of the school year, when I was looking for partners for an e-twinning project with a vocational secondary school, I got very disappointed because I couldn't find vocational schools who were looking for partners. Luckily, I found the project "Active Citizen Companies" which had been running already for a year. I found the topic very interesting and I was really excited to join the project. 

The project implementation flowed really smoothly and there were absolutely no problems with our communication or our collaboration. Paula was a valuable partner. I felt as if we had been partners for a long time! Her innovative ideas and enthusiasm about the project were decisive for the project success. We communicated through a variety of media and responded to each other's mails very quickly. This kept the project moving quickly and we were able to do a lot of activities in a limited time.

The students worked really well together. The biggest problem that I faced was that I couldn't have access to a computer lab whenever needed and the one available was not as functional as it should be for the project needs. Therefore, a lot of students did many activities after school, which shows their willingness to actively participate in the project! 

I also had a close collaboration with my school colleagues and they helped the students with becoming familiar with concepts related to companies, entrepreneurship and finance. If they knew English, they could also follow our activities in our twinspace. 

Students, teachers and our schools all benefited from the project in a variety of ways.The students' evaluation results revealed their positive feelings towards the project activities and this provides us with useful feedback for our future moves and decisions. The students' commitment to the project and their effective collaboration proved invaluable for the project results. I would like to thank all those who helped with the project implementation, especially my colleague, Paula, for your professionalism, devotion and enthusiasm. 

Looking forward to meeting you all!