Global collaboration with iTEC cycles 2, 3 & 4

Harald Wilfer, Adil Tugyan and me

As part of iTEC cycles 2, 3 & 4 activities, and taking advantage of the experience of previous cycles, my 10th grade students of SEK-Atlántico International School (Poio - Pontevedra, Spain) have experienced international collaboration.

Harald Wilfer's students blog

On cycle 2 we chose the Learning Story (LS) "Learning in Teams" which contained collaboration as a main goal. As the iTEC official partner in Spain and Germany is SMART Technologies, our National Pedagogic Coordinator, Ainhoa Marcos, made the effort of searching another SEE participating in iTEC with the same LS in Germany. After contacting with Harald Wilfer, Biology teacher at Bertha-von-Suttner-Schule (Mörfelden-Walldorf, Germany) and after agreeing in what we could share as part of our pilots, we programmed the exchange of learning material between our students, in an interdisciplinary way: Maths from Spain and Biology from Germany. Taking into account the programmed development schedule of our respective pilots, this exchange would take place through two different channels: as German students were using blogs as the main tool for their pilot, my
students should share feedback through comments of their posts, while as Spanish students would develop a Notebook 11 presentation, we would share it with our counterpart though Skydrive or

Page of the Spaninsh summary presentation

Dropbox and they should give us feedback through email. Although we tried different solutions, we couldn't finish the project as scheduled due to the different timing of the scholar year on Germany and Spain; despite of this, the overall experience was positively assessed by both partners, as it permitted some profitable contacs between our students and a deeper understanding of our respective educational systems with their similariries and differences.

On cycles 3 and 4, and after meeting at the 3rd iTEC International Teachers Workshop held in Brussels on September 2012, Adil Tugyan, a Turkish EFL teacher, and me thought about stablishing a kind of permanent collaboration program while developing our respective pilots with the same LS ("Redesigning School" on cycle 3 and "Telling a Story" on cycle 4). For that, apart from the use of our school blogs, iTEC platform, Facebook open "iTEC students collaborate" and Youtube channels to share our experiences, we decided to open a Facebook closed group for our students to communicate, share experiences and give feedback to one

Closed Fb group

another. During the last scholar year, a permanent flow of information was exchanged and our students took advantage of that extended expertise. Even although our subjects are completely different (I teach Maths) and our students chose completely different ways of redesigning school and stories to tell, the experience was really useful, and it took us to define a new project inside the eTwinning format. In this case, we focused on the advantages of exchanging experiences from different cultural and social points of view, and the enrichment that those exchanges can bring to our students. At the start of this new scholar year, our eTwinning project received the European Quality Label, an award that recognises its contribution to build European awareness on our students.