Guide: Complete Guide

The Apréli@ Network
Educative e-Twinnings

Complete Teacher's Guide

Welcome to the Apréli@ e-twinning community

You are going to participate in an innovative educational experience: your class’s e-twinning with a class in another city, another country or even another continent.

The working method will allow your pupils to have a real audience who will appreciate the work that they will carry out normally in the classroom, whether in English, science, history and geography and in most disciplines. The normal school curriculum is therefore not changed, but is tackled in a motivating environment that allows pupils:

to (re)discover their world to make the partner class dicover it
to discover their partner class’s world
and, perhaps, rediscover their own world through the eyes of their partner class.

You will not constantly be working through the e-twinning with your partner colleague (the teacher of the class partner): you will decide on the themes and moments that best suit your curriculum and your annual progress.

The e-twinning pedagogical model reflects the belonging to a community in which the participant travels from the nearest and best known to go to the farthest and discover the Other, in a double movement: that of decentring to meet the Other coupled with that of centring and of reflection on oneself.

The Apreli@ educative e-twinning is not a traditional school letter exchange where it is often the case that each pupil has a dedicated penfriend with whom s/he exchanged very specific personal information. Our model strongly favours the collective: the aim is therefore not for individuals to present items, but rather for the whole class to arouse their partner class’s curiosity, and make them want to know more ... this will be done through the various chapters of the Travel Diary.

The aim of the exchanges is for each class to produce a digital Travel Diary on the partner class’s town. To achieve this, each class needs to ask its partner class to gather information about itself, its school, neighbourhood, city, region, country, then process the information, organize and present it. To collect the information, pupils call on various resource persons, e.g. parents and local elected officials. The final production, the digital Travel Diary, will be posted on the partner township website, and reflect a collaborative effort involving the school and its partners.

To complete the Travel Diary, pupils will carry out two types of activities:

research, organise and format information about their own environment - including elements of cultural context -, and send them to partners
understand, organise and format information received from their partners and, if necessary, request additional information from them

1. The Apreli@ e-twinning objectives

The Apréli@ e-twinning initiative aims to provide schools, teacher education institutions, townships, regions, countries, with a set of digital resources to conduct educational activities between classes of African countries in a spirit of African integration and also between African classes and classes elsewhere.

Its objectives are:

to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the context of cultural exchanges and global citizenship
to help you, the teacher, develop a different relationship with your pupils so that you can help them discover knowledge together and with you
to give the children responsibility in their learning and towards their environment
for you and your pupils to develop new skills, particularly Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills

2. The Apreli@ approach

The proposed way in is a concentric circles approach, from closest to farthest: us, our class, our school, our neighbourhood, our city, our region, our country, our continent.

This approach allows for school subject input and for adaptation to the suitable level. It is understood that the e-twinning activities are carried out in strict compliance with the existing curricula.
To collect this information, parents, school community officials (e.g. management committees), local officials, are choice contacts. Do not forget to involve the entire school community to complete the Travel Diary in a multi partnership participatory process.
(You can use the TESSA Key Resource Using the local community/environment as a resource http://www.tessafrica.net/files/tessafrica/kr_localenvironment.pdf ).

The approach is pupil-centered: your role as a teacher is going to change according to the needs of the child and the task s/he has to perform. It is likely that you will often be the facilitator rather than the holder and transmitter of knowledge, in order to respond to what the child needs to know to complete the task.

The classroom activities encourage active learning: pupils discover and learn by themselves and together interacting with classmates and various resource persons.

3. Initial contacts, initial timetable

Send an email to your partner colleague briefly introducing yourself and your class (level, number of pupils, girls, boys, ages, and any other information you think is useful).
Decide who will do the first suggestion about:
- the Travel Diary themes to be tackled during the school year
- a timetable for the year (one or two chapters per term?)
Give yourself a deadline for making the decision (if the school year begins in October, end of October would be ideal).
Use email to agree on the timetable. It is desirable to keep to the schedule agreed for the first term. It is always possible to adjust decisions for next term when you evaluate what has happened during the first term.
The schedule below can help you plan the initial work. This section will help your partner colleague and you to define the structure of the Travel Diary so as to define the stages of the implementation. The choices you make will influence both the instructions for information retrieval and for the organisation of the Travel Diary.

	Action	Who	Deadline
1	Suggest themes for the year	Each separately	dd / mm / yyyy
2	Compare suggestions and make the preliminary choice for the year	Together
3	Decide on the outline of the schedule for the year	Together
4	Firm decisions for the first term	Together
5	Start the module “Who is who?”	Each separately
6	Exchange work digitally	Each
7	Questions/clarification phase	Each
8	Exchange documents for validation	Each
9	Complete the module	Each separately
10	Exchange completed outcome	Each

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4. Preparing modules and chapters

Download the guidance document for the module or the chapter on which your class and your partner class will be working.

Read the guidance carefully and annotate it so that you can refine it with your partner colleague.

Questions to ask yourself: What skills and knowledge will need to be in place to ensure that pupils can do the work required? What should be revised or learned? How long will this require?

In the guidance, alternative activities are often proposed: which will be most appropriate for your class?

What equipment will you need?

Who, in school or in the community could support you for some of the work?

Organise a telephone call with your partner colleague to compare the needs of your respective classes in order to harmonize the dates when the various stages will take place (points 2, 3, and 4 in the table above). The timetable proforma may help you plan for this initial work. It is attached as an appendix at the end of this document.

5. Classroom organisation

Organise your class into groups (or subgroups). You can consult the TESSA Key Resource Using Group work in your Classroom http://www.tessafrica.net/files/tessafrica/kr_groupwork.pdf
Involve your pupils in deciding on these groups.

Make sure that the groups are balanced in all aspects, in terms of both the girls / boys mix and of distribution of attainment levels and attitudes (e.g. pupils who are active / passive, slow / fast).
Ask each group to appoint a secretary and a spokesperson for a defined period.

It is desirable that each pupil should carry out these responsibilities at least once during the year. Care should be taken to encourage girls to be involved and active in leadership roles.

Each group will be in charge of a chapter (or part of a chapter). Within each group, the pupils, led by you, will form sub-groups to handle specific tasks (e.g. check spelling and syntax; work on the layout; select and insert pictures or sound ; put the data in a table, etc.)

6. Nature of the work to be performed by groups

Depending on the modules they are working on, pupils seek two kinds of information:
- objective, general, macro-social (e.g. city map, monuments, places of leisure)
- singular, subjective, micro-social (eg a recipe for the partners’ favourite dish, or games during breaktime)

They collect information in various and diverse forms (texts, images, sounds)
There are two types of sessions:
- Sessions for finding information concerning one’s own territory
- Sessions to process the information received from partners

7. Celebrating achievement

To celebrate the pupils’ achievement after they have completed all the work in a module, it will be good to organise an event to which some members of the community will be invited. This event will be an opportunity to highlight and assess achievement. This will also bind closer ties with your community.

The module or chapter pedagogical guidance sheets will offer suggestions, and you can share ideas with your partner colleague.

8. The Travel Diary

Content

The Travel Diary is made up of the introductory module "Who is Who?" and 7 chapters. It is crucial to start with the introductory module "Who is Who?" followed by Chapter 1.

Partner classes will then agree to tackle a few chapters of their choice (up to 3 or 4 chapters in the school year) in the order they deem most appropriate, depending on the curriculum and the expected progression during the school year.

Introductory module: Who is who?

Chapters:

Chapter 1: Our partners’ class and school
Chapter 2: Our partners’ games, at school, at home, in the district
Chapter 3: Our partners’ favourite dishes
Chapter 4: Around our partners’ school
Chapter 5: Festivals and celebrations in our partners’ school, district, village, town, regions, country
Chapter 6: Our partners’ school and its partners in the community
Chapter 7: Those small creepy-crawlies that annoy our partners

Where possible, it is suggested to link activities with the Millennium Development Goals, such as: Fighting against diseases (MDG 6), protecting the environment (MDG 7 and 8), fighting against hunger (MDG 1), achieving universal primary education (MDG 2), promoting gender equality and empowerment of women (MDG 3).

Process

Most chapters begin with a brainstorming session (http://www.tessafrica.net/files/tessafrica/kr_brainstorming.pdf) to develop the list of questions to ask the partners. Using the answers they receive, pupils will be able to undertake the writing of the chapter in groups. They may also use other sources of information (e.g. resource persons, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, on paper or online, such as Wikipedia). And if they require further information, they will send additional questions to their partners.
Order of chapters: to follow the Travel Diary logic (i.e. moving in increasing concentric circles around the pupil), it is highly advisable to start with Chapter 1 " Our Partners’ Class and School " as it is conceived as a natural extension to “Who is Who?”, where each class has started to discover the partners’ faces, names, and some individual elements about them.

From there on, all activities are the property of the collective group rather than the individual. The work is group work.

For the remainder of the Travel Diary, it is desirable that the partner teachers have agreed before the start of activities so as to ensure that the order chosen is consistent with their respective annual learning objectives and progression.

Realistically, it is advisable to tackle only a few chapters (3 or 4 in the school year) so as work through them easily and effectively, while identifying possible improvements.

It is paramount to complete a chapter fully before starting another.

For all the chapters of Travel Diary, there are many opportunities to extensions into the various school subjects, depending on the input used by the partner teachers. For example, the chapter on the partner school’s environment lends itself to focusing on the "cultural" input (places of interest, museums, statues, etc. ..) or a more "scientific" one (the fauna, flora, water, in connection with earth science).
The odd one out: The introductory module “Who is who?” has a special and unique status in the Travel Diary, it is designed as the starting point of the e-twinning through the early discovery of the Other. It must therefore be carried out before the start of the Travel Diary chapters.

It is a fun activity quick to complete (match a pupil’s photo and a short description).

As highlighted before, the Apréli@ e-twinning is not a traditional school letter exchange, so individual pupils will not therefore introduce themselves in detail, but rather to arouse the partner class’s curiosity in wanting to find out who the members of the partner class are.

We hope you enjoy working with the Apreli@ e-twinning materials and we are looking forward to receiving your feedback after completing the modules.

Timetable proforma

Action	Who	Deadline
Read the module or chapter guidance sheet
Agree with your partner colleague your own version of this module or chapter guidance sheet
Start the first module or chapter
Exchange questions digitally
Exchange information digitally
Exchange clarification questions
Exchange the answers to the clarification questions
Complete the module
Evaluate outcomes and process
Share evaluation with partner and country coordinator