eTwinning

The eTwinning Action was launched in in 2005 as a result of a recommendation from the European Commission to create an instrument to promote electronic communication between schools in Europe as well as to help teachers develop their ICT and language skills using a dedicated portal – http://www.etwinning.net.

During the period 2007-2013, the actions is part of the Comenius sectoral program and respectively of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme. During this period, eTwinning, launched a virtual platform for projects between teachers from different European countries, and has evolved to the largest social network for teachers and, at the same time, a credible database of projects and partnerships under funding programmes such as Comenius and Leonardo da Vinci.

Since early 2014, eTwinning has been part of the new European programme for education, training, youth and sport “Erasmus+”. The example of the eTwinning platform was used in developing other platforms for communication between institutions working on European projects, such as the ERALE platform, launched in the autumn of 2014.

For the management of the activity there is a Central Support Service (CSS) in Brussels, Belgium (a partner of the European Commission) which coordinates the National Support Service (NSS) in each Member State of the action.

eTwinning enables every teacher to freely register on the portal and start using its pedagogical and communication resources. Through the portal tools, the teachers have the opportunity to work on virtual collaborative partnerships.

eTwinning offers an easy-to-use platform comprising a rich database of ideas and ready-made project kits. Public, municipal and private kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, as well as resource centres for integrated education for children with special educational needs can participate in the projects. The projects within eTwinning are implemented by two or more teachers, school teams or individual methodological groups, librarians and students. Collaboration can take place within one or several learning disciplines.

More information at: http://etwinning.hrdc.bg/