 So, good afternoon everyone and welcome to this webinar offered by the European School Education Platform, the European Commission's Platform for School Education in Europe. My name is Nikki and I will be your host for today. As Marta just said, we are recording this webinar so the recording might be used for dissemination purposes. Also, we have about an hour so if you have any questions for the speakers, feel free to post them in the chat. The focus for today's webinar is how to become an e-twinning school, collaboration and practice. Today we will explore this topic by examining how two passionate teachers embedded e-twinning into their curriculum and how collaboration both inside and outside of the school can lead to new learning methods and innovative pedagogies. It is my pleasure to invite on the virtual stage Elena Petsi and later hopefully also Marisa Vadini to experience and she is here. She is here. Okay. Great. So, it's my pleasure to welcome both of them to the virtual stage. They are two experienced and passionate e-twinners from Italy. Elena and Marisa, the floor is all yours. Okay. Thank you. So as Marisa has already entered the room, I don't know if she can speak, she can open her microphone otherwise, because this slide was hers, otherwise I'll go and well, just to start, this is the idea we'd like to share with you this afternoon. First of all, thanks a lot for inviting us today to share our experiences, our, well, the collaboration we tried to put in practice in our schools. And this first slide is intended to give you the idea of what collaboration is within the framework of e-twinning school. Because e-twinning schools actually display a strong commitment to collaboration sharing and teamwork. This is the main idea and the leading thread that we'd like today to share with you. Teachers in the school work together as a team, this is the important idea to plan their e-twinning and other pedagogical activities and share their experiences and practices with their colleagues both inside and outside their school. Oh, I don't see my presentation any longer. What happened? You can see it, it disappeared from my desktop and they collaborate on providing an e-twinning action plan and use it to drive innovation and change in their school and beyond. So this is our leading thread for today, e-twinning and other pedagogical activities, collaboration within this framework. So just a little bit, what are we talking about today? These very, very simple ideas. First of all, who we are, because you will see that we belong to two different educational contexts. So this is important for what we are going to say in a while. Our context, of course, BC versus AC, before COVID and after COVID. You know that those two periods of time supposed a great, great, different set and a difference in working at school and outside school. So following this idea, our experiences, what we did with our colleagues and other participants in our educational community, some hints and tips, nothing special, nothing particularly relevant, but our experience again. And of course, you've got the floor at the end. If you've got questions, doubts, experiences, comments, whatever, the floor is yours. So first of all, Marisa, are you there? Unfortunately, she's not here. We cannot find her in the list. So we are trying to talk to her in the background, but she's not here. Definitely. She wrote to me, I'm in and I asked her where. I hope she's, she's there. Well, I'll try to, I start. And then as soon as Marina, as Marisa appears, please interrupt me and give the, give the floor to, to Marisa. Okay, so just a short overview and a short introduction of ourselves because as I told you, we belong to two different, very different educational contexts. Marisa was a primary teacher. She worked for lots of years at the Ottavo Circolo in Piacenza, which, which is a primary school, pre-primary and primary school in the northern part of Italy, my same region, Emilia Romagna. I would say at the two opposite poles of Emilia Romagna, Piacenza, quite near to Milan, and I'm Elena, I'm a Spanish teacher. That's why my English is a little bit worried. I'm a Spanish teacher at a secondary, upper secondary school in Bologna, which is the capital of Emilia Romagna, of our region. And you, you will see here our wonderful cloister. Sorry to interrupt you, Elena, but I think we are good to go because Marisa is here. Marisa, can you open your microphone? Okay, great. Just to, to end my introduction, I work at Liceola Urrabasi, upper secondary school, and Ufficio Scolastic originale, which is the regional department of the Ministry of Education in our region, in Italy and in our region, where I work with teacher trainers. I, I do research about innovative daggers and digital methodologies and so on. Marisa, the floor is yours. Okay, okay. Can you hear me now? Yes, here we can. I'm really sorry, but I was listening to you. I was hearing everything, but it was quite difficult for me. Now I'm here and Elena introduced me so we can go on. And I can talk about my experience. I, I apologize for this inconvenience, but I'm, I was teacher at Ottavio Circular Piacenza, and now I'm a supporter for a European dimension in Clil and I'm a trainer as well. And the background of our school that is a cluster of seven schools, two primary and five preprimal schools. It's connected with the European dimension. We started from a community experience, but the real experience for collaboration was built up thanks to Erasmus, Erasmus K1 and, and then partnerships in K2 projects that were joined with the screening projects as well. And so we had the opportunity to have different quality labels to win a prize and to win also the European language label and take part. We were a training school and we took part in the monitoring and development activities for a training schools. That's why you can go on Elena. Thank you. And that's why the first step for our collaboration inside our institution that has seven schools also located in different places of our town was just the European School Development Plan. We did for our K1 open roads to Europe, where we had the opportunity to share our aims together as a school that wanted to match the best goals for our collaboration. In fact, we had the continuity of our school that was our primary goal, and it was made up by the English communication starting from primary schools and then implementing in primary schools and was aimed at inclusion at European dimension based on European key competencies and also to foster ICDIC skills. And it was the first step for a real collaborative practice that we started. Elena. Yeah, I was running a little bit too much. Yeah, if Marisa's context is what she has said to you, my context, as I said before, is a little bit different because I'm a Spanish teacher at a secondary, upper secondary school. So, you know, in Italy, it is sometimes difficult to foster collaboration to have spontaneous collaboration between teachers in upper secondary schools. I hope that other colleagues' experience is different, but in my school, it was quite difficult to have this kind of spontaneous collaboration. So, back in 2019, seems pretty historical age, we tried to carry out a pilot project. The two words, I mean, School Education Gateway and Betweenling were still separated. There was no EZEP platform and we gathered together. We were 10 teachers from 10 different countries in Europe and we started carrying out pilot projects promoted by Teacher Academy from School Education Gateway and it was a school-based case study. This project was aimed at analyzing how online courses could be used more systematically at school level to support teachers' professional development and collaboration. So it was a pilot project aimed at fostering collaboration and training inside school. In order to help teachers to develop their profession and to improve their skills. I was saying 2019 was ages ago, it was before COVID. We could meet together on site, face-to-face, and we gathered together, we met together to learn together and to learn how to collaborate together in a more effective way, both for ourselves, teachers, as well as for, in order to better help our students to collaborate together themselves. So we met and we followed, we carried out a series of activities, collaborative activities, and we followed MOOC, Massive Open Online Courses, organized by Teacher Academy. But as you all know, COVID appeared and in 2020 and 2021 on-site meeting weren't allowed. So we couldn't meet on site. That's why we decided to go online and to meet online to keep learning together. As we experienced such a positive aspect of on-site collaboration, of learning together, we decided to keep on doing that online. And the same was happening that was, as we were selected among the six E-Tweening School to take part in the E-Tweening School Monitoring and Development Activity at European level, guided by the E-Tweening Central Support Service. And as these six schools, six representative schools met in Brussels for two on-site meeting and then we had to take online meetings just because it was 2019 and then COVID appeared. But the idea, the aim of this project was to create a network at the European dimension about exchange of good practices to become an E-Tweening School. And the actions that were the goals of this project, of these activities, were to direct and implement an action plan inside each school and then share our experiences and also have a developing interdisciplinary E-Tweening project in pairs. So we could experience the training for to became an E-Tweening School mission. You can now go on, Elena, thank you. And we started to ask, how can we do to reach effective collaboration? And here we found the second opportunity and second step also joining collaboration with a shared leadership approach. In fact, we started to share a vision and a vision centered on students' learning needs and supported by the Center Support Service. And the example of the other school in France, Romania, Turkey, Spain, we could start the process of a shared leadership, integrating teachers' competencies and expertise in the process of our development as a E-Tweening School. We created and supported continuous learning opportunities, fostering also team learning, working and planning and trying to implement collaboration at the local, national and international level. How did we could reach these aims? We can go on our steps to implement the E-Tweening School action. As our action plan was just to reach a best collaboration, a better collaboration. We're just the ones to monitoring our school needs, both as teachers and also the staff needs and the organizational problem we had to solve. We started to share a common vision, mission, researching to engage all the teachers and discovering their expertise. We had also outside school meetings. We tried, me and the other colleague that was in Brussels with me. We were the two headmaster deputies and we started to find opportunities to meet also in informal ways with other teachers to connect each other. And so distributed leadership was developed through commission teams to subject teachers' teams for different subjects, but also great teams to connect the pedagogy collection and to collaborate inside the classroom. And our project teams taking part in different projects, Erasmus, E-Tweening, but also local or national projects. And so trying to join all these different teamwork. We can go on Elena and so we carried out trainings and online workshops on European dimension. And this program went on for three years, between us continuity among the two school orders, Mutua support, international projects. And we also, the following slide can show you that we also were supported with our online dimension of pitching training, teacher training in COVID times because it was possible for us to keep connected even if we couldn't met face to face as Piacenza was the first town who closed the schools in February and in February 2020 and we couldn't reopen schools. So our connection that we had established before were really supportive and the following slide will show you how we implemented collaboration through the project one was the one that supported the monitoring and development activity and was made up with the Spanish partner and the others supported at the same well because we created another project. We went on with our Erasmus project that was connected with honey greening one and so traditionally it the following slide is showing how we reached our our the goals that we tried to reach. First of all, the project was involving engaging all the students from primary to prime to primary with three different levels of development, even if on the same topics that we had planned and the teachers collaborated and we supported the training to implement the project also knowing the better use of the platform between the platform, new tools and so on. We improved the collaboration and we also improved our learning our language skills, the teachers improved their language communication skills and they opened it to local and international collaboration, just learning by doing and improving step by step, even if we finished this project in distance and you can go on Elena. Thank you. And we to improve and increase our collaboration, just in such difficult times, we created an attwining group. It was Otavocirco, the training group and it was for teachers at our schools that had the opportunity to find on the training platform in the twin space repository, where to share ideas, project, projects, materials, also including new arrived teachers, new early teachers in our school and letting them enter and collaborate. It was a great support that was also integrated with the summer equining projects we created for continuity. And they were just for our school, but we could use the platform, the training platform to collaborate, primary to primary. And and it was a great opportunity for all the students to teach and the students to teach to the younger one, even if online, because we couldn't meet face to face. And it was the the great opportunity of attwining and so collaboration supported the school goals from the coordination of the staff to the collaboration with teachers and we improve the creativity, inclusion, flexibility and also school special events that could be organized. And thanks to this collaborative atmosphere and we had different events from concert to special events, solidarity markets and Erasmus days that went went on and contributed to strength different forms of teamwork and integration to integrate each other. OK, so yeah, thanks, Marisa, please do take for granted and do consider that all the aspects that Marisa has covered in explaining her experience are the same that we experienced in our school with some little differences. As I told you before, I think that in Italy is more difficult to have a spontaneous collaboration among teachers in an upper secondary school and above all, general upper secondary school, not vet school. For instance, I'm I'm thinking about this difference. So for us, it was a big challenge to to try to implement this school based cases study in our school. And we we met together. It was our school is quite a big school. We are more or less one hundred eighty teachers in our school. And for us, it was a huge success to to meet more or less a third of the of the teachers who are in our schools. And we met together to follow to take the introduction and introducing project based learning in your classroom book. So it was a a sort of collaboration aimed at learning something together. Of course, we we had we encountered some main challenges some issues, but we tried to to find possible solutions to to those challenges. The biggest challenge was time. Time constraints, teachers are always very busy, always. But the period of time we chose to follow the course to take the course was actually was really a very, very busy period. And a lot of teachers couldn't do the homework assigned by the course by foreseen by the course itself. Another challenge, another issue, English, you know, upper secondary school, my school is a school formed by a good number of old teachers. English was a problem for quite a good number of them, not for everyone, of course, but for many teachers. Yes, but what was the positive aspect they engaged anyway in the course? And last but not least, ICT is a was a problem not for everyone again, but for many teachers. Yes. And maybe remember it was before covid. It was in 2019 at that time, ICT was a great challenge, a great issue for a good number of teachers. I don't want to say that covid was something positive. It was not, of course, but one good lesson we thought by covid was that we all the teachers were forced to go online and to improve their skills on ICT. This was a positive aspect that I will take you about Tokyo about later on. So given these challenges, we were the possible solutions. First of all, time constraints. Yeah, it's true. We we were working in a very busy period, but taking the course together, working together, realizing the activities together helped teacher to overcome their problems and to complete the course and the collaborative activities. English is a problem. Well, let's try to reshape the path to summarize the main concepts. Let's try to provide some extra time for reflection on the topics for development of the activities during the meeting meetings themselves. So we tried to turn the challenges into opportunities and the same meeting face to face, meeting on site, help the teacher with less language or ICT skills because there was someone always ready to to help to overcome issues and challenges. That's why teachers at the end of these collaborative activities gave a very positive feedback about this way of learning and working together. What worked well, well, they said that it was important to meet together to follow the course. Working together is without a doubt much more enjoyable and productive. And the one of the best ideas, one of the added value of these way of collaborating together was the fact that that they had a tutor, a more experienced teacher who helped them and guided them through the activities. They found it very, very useful. Then they also appreciate appreciated the use of short videos. If you plan some collaborative activities, learning activities, think about having short pieces of video to give useful, useful food for thought or to illustrate how to use some educational tool. So very short pieces of different aspects that could help teachers less skilled. Of course, not everything was wonderful. And the biggest problem was again, the time, very little time to complete the activities. Time constraints, both at school at personal level, often prevented the completion of the activities themselves. But we have to say that the interest was always very, very high and the desire to complete the activities was authentic, even because the idea was to put them in practice with the students, which was something very important and something where all the teachers who participated in the course could do. They could put in practice the the collaborative activities that we carried out together during the the path of the course. And that's just what I was do. We were doing in the next year because the study group experience, the pilot study group based on online learning professional development was continued for a second round and we had the great opportunity to take part and taking part in this in this project in this part was an extra an extra, an extra, an extra effect to improve collaboration. This time, we thought it was a great opportunity for us to have professional development online to prepare for our most mobilities, for example. And so if Elena can please and so we set up study group for these online professional development. We were just truly connected, but having had the accreditation for a new opportunity of development at European at European dimension. We prepared and we'd like to improve our shared action in teaching and it was a double double goal, improve our learning improve in learning methodologies in learning language in trying with students new methodologies and new parts just keeping in touch with innovation and prepare to erasmus mobilities. So 15 teachers to part in this group and they represented all the seven schools of Tavocirculo with different roles and expertise. Some of them were in the school staff, some others were for pupils special needs, some other were for inclusion commission, some other for the digital commission language commission and so on. And we followed three online professional development from webinar to a short course and finally to the book. It was really engaged, engaging and challenging parts, but we supported each other and we worked, we did lots of different meetings, but also small groups, we worked in small groups supporting each other. I supported because I was quite free to follow the different groups, but it was great to see that teachers were satisfied in following these discourses. They, one of the teachers went to the hospital, but she wanted to continue and she worked in pair with another teacher and it was quite impressive how the feeling and the passion went over the challenges, time and other things. And we also took a collaborative diary and we tried to implement these actions. It was great as we made a different experience also in outdoor learning. That was one of our priorities and we felt we felt good, we felt prepared also for Erasmus Guapinitis. Elena, if you can. OK, these were the three opportunities I mean us and a short course about the student designers of learning spaces that involved lots of teachers and we implemented a lot of these the activities that were planned in our in our learning journal. And finally, we took part in a book for shaping lifelong learners that was followed with great engagement. Someone couldn't finish the course, but everyone was happy to have materials, find new learning opportunities and revise also what was proposed in the in the future during summer and so on. So what was implemented during these courses was then something that we can we could share because we created, if Elena can go on with the slides, we created also on a WhatsApp group as usual. Now it's quite common to do it, but it was useful to for a quick exchanges of the info but we created another group that was just for the study group and here another training group and here we could share these experience, this process and we supported thanks to the opportunity that the training offered us. And and finally, in the next slide you can see our collaborative diary. We had we shared a pilot when we put materials, experiences, implementation, improvement, following the three online professional development. And that's why we can always go to this pilot and you have the link if you want to go and and see and we share the materials and we are always going there for success for other other works, other experiences. OK. OK, so this is how this project, this second part, this second year of the pilot worked and in that pilot we were we were asked to do something more. Those of us who were in the in the first pilot we were asked to do something more. And what I tried to do more was gathering the experience we first had at the very beginning of the COVID time. I mean the lockdown being forced to work from home, isolated, but using a twinning platform as a way to to stay together to overcome this difficult period, which I tried to put it in practice with another or from another point of view. We always we can always learn together and collaborate despite the difficult situation. So having experience that learning together online was possible and even more useful for more people because you can connect from different places and you can learn from different situations and context. So the learning is even richer if you can adopt this way of thinking. We met together again. We were teachers from all over the region, not only from my school, but teachers. You can see here teachers from all over Emilia Romagna. We took another course from another MOOC from School Education Gateway from Teacher Academy and we started collaborating together in an online way. We could do that thanks to a platform we have at a regional level. As I said before, I have a part time job at the Regional Ministry of Education in in Emilia Romagna and there we have a platform and we offer training courses through this platform that you see here. We could have online collaboration wider than face to face thanks to this platform. We formed a regional group of teachers and digital trainers because as as a group at the regional level, we deal with the digital trainers from the different schools of the region. We met via Meet or Teams or any other digital platform and we worked together. We collaborated together at sharing presentations, padlets, as Marisa has already shown you. We shared our learning diaries and we tried to think, to organize, to plan some collaborative activities to put in practice together later on with our students, both online because the following year, the school year 2021 was already a year where when we had classes mixed both online and on site. And another added value was the middle management staff. I mean, a group of teachers who already had the experience of collaborating together face to face on site and they could help those teachers who met online for the first time to take these courses to do these collaborative activities. This middle management who was very, very helpful to solve doubts to help teachers in order to overcome any possible issue. So this experience helped more schools to collaborate together, which was an incredible success seen from our point of view because we couldn't imagine that we could reach so many teachers all over our region and even outside our region because lots of teachers knew that possibility and they they enrolled this platform. They entered this platform to take the course and to collaborate together. So to sum up, it's already time to go towards the end to sum up our experience, what we can say. We can give you some hint and tips. And as I said before, it's nothing special. It's nothing extraordinary. It's simply our experience, which, for instance, suggests us to tell you, please do start always with a survey on the school staff needs. Be accurate, be sincere about the needs of your colleagues and of your teachers at school about professional development and collaboration. Again, it's important to designate to choose a responsible person to monitor the whole team's progress during the development of the activities. There should be someone who is in charge of the progress of the whole activity to check if everything is going well. You know, the acronym team together, everybody achieves more. Set up group, group studies so that participants can support and motivate each other. Being together, it's it's obvious. We are saying something really, really obvious, but doing things together can produce greater and higher results. So do it together. Of course, be very careful with time management tasks and deadlines for the foreseen activities, time constraints. We will repeat it endlessly. And of course, create repositories with the materials created. Marisa showed you the groups, the twinning groups they created. We created a new twinning group, but also a drive, a shared drive with all the materials in order to make use of them in other educational contexts, with our students, for instance, but also to make them available for the wider audience, the wider educational community. So it's very important to keep this idea of sharing, sharing always in mind. And so to set up a community of practice, first of all, as Elena was saying just before, it's teacher collaboration at a different level, but with giving value to each one. It's important to give value of the different expertise and student collaboration, improving student collaboration as well. Also, collaboration between students and teachers, creating a sort of research of a common path for development, just discovering together innovative paths. And then collaboration with parents, it's important and other stakeholders. Because, for example, we tried to collaborate, we had a different opportunity to collaborate with local agencies, with the municipality. Students became heard ambassadors, for example, working with the late or infambiente for sustainability. It's important that collaboration goes outside the school and spread is the idea that school promotes collaboration, links and being active at a different level, of course, in international collaboration, with projects like Erasmus and Twinning that support this wonderful net of teachers at school all around Europe and beyond. Yeah, our goal is to go well beyond Europe. And, yeah, you see, in this presentation, we've put all the links. We didn't open them because we didn't have time to do that. But if you want to go and click on the links we've put on our presentation, you will see a little bit more in-depth what we did and what was our experience. And if you're looking for more info about this experience, we carried out, we both carried out. Last week, just one week ago, this article was published. You can have a look at this article on the on a ZEP, on the platform. So you can have a wider overview and a wider look on how school-based study groups can facilitate professional development for teachers. Of course, always we aim with the goal of fostering collaboration because we both think that collaboration is the core mission of our schools, not only between schools, but all the schools in general should put a great focus on collaboration. The acronym TEAM, together everyone achieves more, means that by collaboration you can reach great goals and great success. So now it's your turn. Have you got any questions, doubts, comments and so on? So the floor is yours. Well, first, thank you Marissa and Elena for the great presentation about your experience. We have some very, very nice comments in the chat. This is that it's inspiring and really interesting experience. Before we go on to the Q&A portion, I'm going to share an evaluation form in the chat. Please don't forget to fill that out. We want to hear your feedback on the webinar, how it went, how you liked it and how we can improve. So I'm going to post that in the chat here. We do have one question so far. It says, I am new to e-twinning. I would like to ask if there is a minimum of school teachers involved in the project in order to become an e-twinning school? And if the way to create this kind of project is the same as you create a normal project? Thank you. Yeah, more or less it's the same. I mean, normal projects can imply collaboration between teachers and students. What Marisa was saying just in the end of the presentation, make your students collaborate with teachers, create e-twinning projects to realize this kind of collaboration. And yeah, it's the same. I think, I don't know if Marisa, you think the same. Yes, of course. We are here, we can answer if you want to write us also on the, through the e-twinning platform you can reach in ways. And we are, I'm available to answer, but I think that on the e-twinning platform you can find a lot of advice on how to develop new projects. And I think that is an incredible adventure for students and for teachers as well. Collaborating in international dimension. Great, great. We do have another question. Do you know some teacher training course in relation to co-teaching? There's another, is just arriving another course about collaboration. Collaboration, I think it is starting on the 20th of March, isn't it? And so just on the Z platform or a European platform, I can't remember. There are different professional development that improve collaboration. Just look for them, because there are lots of courses. Elena, do you think that... And also, well, it's not a precise answer to this question, but listening to this question I was thinking that a great practical course of co-teaching is through an e-twinning project. It's true that you don't teach at the same time with the same class, but it's true that you teach at the same time to different groups, to two or more different groups of students, but you are the same teacher for the same students, although they are in different countries. So it's a great professional course in practice on how to be co-teachers within the same framework of an e-twinning project. I know that it's not specific training course, but it's very useful. Learning by doing. Learning by doing. It's not just based on learning in practice. Okay. There's a question in the chat. Have you recorded this meeting? Yeah, as a reminder, the webinar has been recorded, and you will be able to find the presentation and the recording on the ESSEP platform, the European School Education Platform. And I think there are no more questions in the chat. If anybody has any more, feel free to type them in. Otherwise, I will go ahead and post this. Do you have any, we do have another question. Do you have any tips for finding partners? Browse the platform. And look for, be careful. It's a suggestion for ourselves and also for other partners. Be precise with the description of your profile so that people can get in touch with you in the right way. So, Browse, serve the platform and try to find teachers who can have more or less your same characteristics, ideals, ideas, and so on. Okay. Thank you very much. And I think that we're going to have to wrap up. Once again, I'm going to share the survey here. Please don't forget to fill that out. Marisa and Elena, thank you once again for taking the time to speak to teachers. And we hope the participants got a lot out of it. It seems that they did as they're typing in the chat. So thank you once again. And to everyone else, have a nice afternoon. Thank you. Thank you indeed for inviting us. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.