Almost every aspect of life is now looked at through a digital lens, which means that schools are having to explore the new ways to stay connected with their pupils, staff and parents.
For teachers, this presents the opportunity and challenge of using virtual platforms to motivate and engage students, while also making sure lessons are reflective of digital skill levels.
This has become especially key in the Covid-19 lockdown.
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Paddy Carroll, assistant headteacher at Shaw Wood Academy Primary School in Doncaster, wanted to find a way to lift the spirits of his school community during shutdown.
“This is such a difficult time for so many children and parents. I wanted to give them a focus and do something that makes them feel better connected,” he says.
And so he started a project called Alone Together through the eTwinning platform, which was co-founded by Erasmus+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth and sport, and is managed in the UK by the British Council.
The free online community is available to schools in Europe and some neighbouring countries, allowing teachers to find partners, develop projects together and to share ideas and new ways of learning.
Carroll found that staff in schools in Romania, Italy, Turkey, Spain and Belgium responded to his idea. They, too, were eager to share what they had been working on, and to hear new ways to motivate their students and connect with families.
The ideas varied from creative projects - such as students drawing pictures of rainbows and their favourite teachers, and illustrating how they’d been helping out their parents - to more practical recommendations for online resources that they’d found useful.
Teachers from each school would then post the ideas they liked on their school’s Facebook page and set new challenges for parents and carers to try with their children.
The “draw your teacher” challenge, for example, generated more than 130 Facebook comments and posts, with teachers at the schools commenting on their portraits, which delighted pupils, Carroll explains.
“This project has really boosted my enthusiasm,” he says. “The fact that we get lots of ideas is brilliant. Having conversations with colleagues in schools across Europe makes you feel more connected. It’s really heartwarming. These are simple ideas, but the children really love that they can see what others have created.”
Motivating learning
The idea for Alone Together grew out of a previous digital partnership; the Say No to Plastic Pollution (SNOPP) project, for Year 6s, which ran from 2018-19 and has been awarded the overall eTwinning European prize for Citizenship in 2020.
Schools in France, Germany and Poland joined the project through a shared desire to help reduce the amount of plastic being used in their communities.
“We thought it would be interesting for pupils to see how different communities tackle this issue and share ideas,” Carroll continues.
Students from each school came up with survey questions and shared the results, with schools exploring how their local council was helping to reduce plastic pollution. Themes included reducing plastic bag and bottle usage, and using alternative containers to carry food items, such as glass and clay jars.
The schools also set each other monthly challenges to complete, as children made Christmas cards from pieces of plastic, bird feeders from plastic bottles and conducted an outdoor experiment measuring how long different materials took to degrade.
“This way of working made the project more meaningful,” Carroll explains. “They enjoyed the fact that they could see straight away what their peers were working on, and that some of their ideas were similar.
“Students in the other schools were wording questions in a way that took their questions a bit deeper, and came up with ideas that challenged us to think in a different way. The students got to see the world beyond the four walls of their classroom, and they saw how their actions could make a difference.”
Supporting teacher training
International partnerships can also be helpful in supporting teacher training.
St Mary’s Primary School in Mullaghbawn, Northern Ireland, for example, has been working for nearly 20 years on a number of international projects, both within and outside of Europe, to boost staff skills.
“We identified that we needed to develop staff training in the area of digital literacy, and chose to focus on a project that would help with that,” explains Ciara Crawley, a teacher and coordinator of international projects at the school.
A three-year project - set up in 2017 as part of Connecting Classrooms Through Global Learning (a programme funded by the British Council and UK Aid) - saw 10 schools in Northern Ireland and 10 schools in Nepal work together on a shared IT project focusing on raising the profile of coding, especially among girls.
Gender equality within IT was an area that all of the schools had identified as needing improvement, in line with the UN’s sustainable development goals.
“Working in a cluster is great for motivation, and it meant that we got to work alongside schools in Northern Ireland that we wouldn’t usually work with,” Crawley continues.
Staff were trained in coding, along with how to use Google Classroom, Google’s suite of apps and iMovie, and how to create QR codes.
The students in Northern Ireland put their skills to use on a problem-solving project to design a maze using code for a robot. Each school then made a short video using iMovie about an environmental issue in their country.
The films were embedded in QR codes and printed on a large floor mat, dotted at various points within the maze. Then, during a visit to Nepal in 2020, staff from the Northern Ireland cluster took the mat for the students in Nepal to use.
“Children loved watching the films of students using the mat they had created, and directing the robot to each QR code to watch their videos,” Crawley says.
“Focusing on coding in the project has raised awareness among our girls and some have expressed the desire to choose IT for a career.
“But the project has also helped our students to learn about shared challenges faced by other countries, and taught them that we have something to offer as well.”
If you’d like to make links with a partner school, the eTwinning platform can connect with you schools in Europe, where you join an approved project or start your own. Connecting Classrooms Through Global Learning can help you find a suitable international partner, and offers funding to support global learning in schools.
Questions to consider in advance:
● What topic or issue would you like your students to further explore?
● Can you link your project to the UN’s sustainable development goals?
● How many schools would you like to partner up with, and do you want to work in a cluster?
● Time zones - is there a window for regular meetings within your school working hours?
● Language barriers - consider whether students are able to translate. You can also use Microsoft Translator app, which translates live conversations.
How to keep a partnership moving:
● Establish a clear project time frame.
● Set regular meetings with partner schools through video conferencing.
● Encourage partner schools to set monthly challenges for each other - and share what they’ve achieved.
● Consider calendar events that you can tie your project to.
● Keep the project visual - connect through sharing pictures and videos.
Claire Shaw is a freelance education journalist
