Α rather ...ambitious project on the factor of “number” and “country of origin” of the partners as the core idea to model Europe in the scale of the solar system, with Europe’s geographical center in Westerngrund as the Sun, and the participant schools in the planets’ orbits, had emerged the need of many partners. Especially, many partners needed in the “inner planets orbits”, which actually should be from Germany (to represent Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars). This task, approaching eTwinners from Germany and convince them to participate, was really hard and with rather poor results. We had felt relieved to have at least one school per inner planet at the end of August. Also, finding European schools for the Neptunian orbit was a hard task. We had approached European schools in the North and South America (French and Danish territories) and in the Indian Ocean (French Territories) but these teachers were interested in Erasmus mobilities rather than a “pure” eTwinning collaboration. We were lucky to find two schools to participate in the Neptunian orbit. They were one school from Russia (Siberia) and one from Colombia. We had collaborated with these teachers in previous eTwinning projects and they were the ones that had accepted the challenge.
So, starting the project in September, we were 90 partners (88 registered eTwinners and 2 registered teachers that were international).
But...working with 360 panoramic photos was VERY demanding! It was a field of “exploration”, finding the best tool to take the photo, to edit it, post it and share it, and adopt it in a format that can be embedded in twinspace. Starting from early August, the most devoted teachers had formed a community of practice in the twinspace Forum working on web2 tools and panoramic photos. We have helped each other and we have learned many things from each other. And if there is only ΟΝΕ very positive personal impact for the teachers worth mentioned about this project, it is exactly that: learning and working in a community of practice. Unfortunately, some of the registered teachers had found these tasks very demanding or difficult for their young students and in November they have abandoned the …”bus”.
Our aim in this project was to motivate our students to work in their curriculum (English and French as a Foreign Language, in ICT class and in other subjects as Ethics or cross-curricular), being creative and enthusiastic as “tourists” in our partners’ cities, schools, and classrooms.
360 photos were “our magic bus” in this adventure and were purposely chosen, as we knew that our students are familiar with 3D virtual environments, as “consumers” through gaming. We know that virtual reality and 3D virtual spaces are very attractive to our students. Thus, we had the aim for them to explore the creation of “virtual tours” and 3D presentation with photos of “real-world” (their everyday world in class, school, their city) by themselves
Also, our aim was our students to learn through gaming(quizzes): “educative fun” by creating and playing quizzes about aspects of the European values (Democracy, Environmental Awareness), European Collaboration (Aviation), Culture, and solar System, scales, maps.
And for these quizzes to be really a learning experience based on inquire, in a collaborative project-based approach, we had created and scheduled the conditions for our groups of students to search by themselves and collaborate in the creation of the questions of these quizzes.
Our students were very enthusiastic to work on their tasks as the icebreaking activities (especially the classroom game) had successfully created the sense of a community. The bonds among our classes were tightened in December, with the postal exchanges and the sharing of our customs and traditions in two Live events
The results in this question proves that the teachers have managed very well with the initial aim of students' motivation to work in the curriculum and to be creative and in addition, they evaluate as important, the internationalization of their school, as through the tours in classrooms and schools in our games, the spotlights were on our "everyday" school life. This is also in conherence with the findings in the form of students' evaluation, which replied that they have a slight preference to schools' game more than the rest of the games. We are very pleased that this year of lockdown, our students had managed to visit all these partners' schools and share their peers' reality (an experience that is the best option... imitating real mobility... as a "real mobility" could not be feasible massively, for all of us, even if there were not these special conditions with COVID19)
The major difficulty for teachers was managing with the 360 panoramic photos. On this, our community of practice was quite effective, as the teachers answered that, finally, they had faced no problems with twinspace. Also, teachers answered that there were no difficulties in collaboration and no complaints about the coordination of the project by the administrators.
A second factor that created problems was the lack of time because of issues irrelevant with the project, as teachers replied. COVID19 and the subsequent schools' lockdown seems to be the reason for this, though 18 out of 20 teachers answered that their students had worked in the activities of the project from home during the lockdown. The productions during the lockdown and the posts in our very active project's journal prove that eTwinning has been an important factor of resilience, comfort and support for all of us.
Our project is very collaborative in scheduling. The 22 full active teachers had contributed in all video conferences among the teachers and they had shared ideas of activities to enrich the aspects of our project (the 3 main axes) and also make it easier to adopt the project in all our different curriculums. So, all the teachers evaluate well their performance in the initial-scheduled collaborative tasks. Also, the majoriy of the teachers had responded to the freestyle activities that other partners had proposed, keeping the collaborative spirit throughout all the activities in this project.
Final one teachers' word about this project...it is important that in the form we have asked for ONE word and some teachers' choice was "challenging", "learning", "inspiring", "original", "unique". These words for the founders are very rewarded, though we are also very pleased that our partners have positive feelings and offer an enthusiastic feedback about their experience here. It was really hard to find the number of the partner we needed for this project, but finally the partners that joined the tour to the end are valuable αs our new friends!
The teachers' evaluation form that we have used: