Managing your twin space
- 1. Managing your TwinSpace • Engage your colleagues • Empower your pupils • Clearly signpost activities • Label your school’s work • Communicate with your partners • Be realistic
- 3. Creating a small school team of staff at your school will make your projectwork more sustainable. You could invite a couple of colleagues from your department/year group into your TwinSpace and encourage them to look at the work you’ve already done. Inviting them to contribute one small thing will allow them to see the impact it has in their classroom.
- 4. To invite your colleagues: Ask them to join eTwinning. Add them as a contact. Then go to ‘Projects’ and ‘Add new partner(s)
- 5. Empower your pupils! (Please make sure you consider your school’s eSafety policy before giving Pupils passwords)
- 6. Everything you’ve done in this TwinSpace, a Pupil could do! You may find it helpful to have a committee of students who take responsibility for uploading work and checking once a week to see if your partners have uploaded anything. To add pupils, go to ‘home’ and ‘Invite pupils’ To give your pupils the ability to add work and new activities make sure you also ‘Manage members’ and change their role to ‘Pupil Administrators’
- 7. What a Pupil Administrator can’t do…. Change the roles or passwords of other members Make anything public See inside the ‘Teachers’ Area
- 8. Clearly signpost your activities!
- 9. Clearly label all your activities with instructions and clear deadlines
- 10. Label your school’s work
- 11. There’s nothing more frustrating for teachers than having lots of great work and not knowing where it came from. It’s also really important that your work is labelled if you want to apply for a Quality Label
- 12. If you’re the only UK school than use UK everywhere, if not you could use the name of your school or the name of your class You may want to consider including UK or the school in name in the titles of…. Activities ….‘Autumn Activity UK’ or ‘Autumn Activity XX school’ Folders ‘Christmas powerpoints from the UK’, ‘Christmas powerpoints from XX school’ ‘Christmas ppt UK’ or ‘Christmas ppt XX school’ Picture of XX School, Logo design UK entry Joe UK or Joe XXschool
- 13. Communicate with your partners
- 14. There are a number of places you and your colleagues can share information: In the activities, In the Blog, In the ‘Teachers’ area or via email. So you need to be clear with your partner so that you don’t miss anything!
- 15. As a teacher you will receive emails to your personal email account when someone emails you on the TwinSpace (Pupils don’t). On the home page you can also see the latest actions: But it’s also a good idea to discuss with your partner what your main form of communication will be and whether you will email each other when work has been uploaded. That way you won’t miss anything.
- 16. Be realistic (and don’t make extra work for yourself)….
- 17. The aim of an eTwinning project is to motivate your pupils. This doesn’t mean that every piece of work has to be uploaded and shared. Making activities competitive can work quite effectively and will allow you to just upload the one or few ‘best’ of everything. Your class could all take part in an activity and then vote for the best piece of work to go onto the TwinSpace….