Abstract
The aim of this research is to look at the key elements that help sustain and scale up a European-wide teacher network called eTwinning. eTwinning, which has more than 250,000 European teachers as members in April 2014, has become an incubator for pedagogical innovation in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for cross-border school collaboration and for formal and informal teacher professional development. The chapter synthesises a series of studies on eTwinning – some of which are more qualitative case studies and others are based on social network analysis (SNA) – focusing on factors that contribute to the further development and mainstreaming of eTwinning. In particular, we look at the growth of the network and its reach among teacher population in Europe. Then, we move to observe deeper level collaboration through pedagogical projects and show how the network can be studied to understand its underlying structures. Finally, through case studies on eTwinning school teams, we also look at micro-level mechanisms for teacher collaboration within an institution to spread pedagogical innovation at the local level.
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Notes
- 1.
The lower estimation is based on the members of the online collaboration spaces used for projects (TwinSpace); the higher estimation is an approximation based on the number of projects including at least two schools/classrooms with an average of 20 pupils each.
- 2.
By teachers we mean all school staff such as teachers, headmasters and librarians who are eligible to join. The registered users need to be affiliated with primary (including pre-school) or secondary education or in initial vocational education and training.
- 3.
See ‘my eTwinning cookbook’ for the variety of pedagogical aspects in projects: http://files.eun.org/etwinning/cookbooks/EN_cookbook.pdf
- 4.
- 5.
European Schoolnet is a network of 30 European Ministries of Education. As a not-for-profit organisation, the aim is to bring innovation in teaching and learning to the key stakeholders: Ministries of Education, schools, teachers, researchers and industry partners.
- 6.
Ambassadors are experienced practitioners in eTwinning who are available to help and advise eTwinners.
- 7.
See, for instance, at http://ec.europa.eu/education/calls/s1013/invitation_en.pdf. The breakdown of EC funding per NSS is calculated by taking into account factors such as the resources necessary for the basic activities of each NSS, the population and the number of projects in each region/country covered by the NSS at hand.
- 8.
- 9.
Data extracted on February 8, 2010, from OECD Statistics at http://stats.oecd.org/ (primary and secondary education, classroom teachers and academic staff, full-time and part-time for 2006–2007). No new data is available.
- 10.
Personas consist of a narrative relating to a user’s daily behaviour patterns using specific details.
- 11.
An example of eTwinning personas: http://www.slideshare.net/europeanschoolnet/etwinning-personas-12956565
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
Modules are short activities which can be incorporated in any type of eTwinning project http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/collaborate/modules.htm
- 16.
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Vuorikari, R., Kampylis, P., Scimeca, S., Punie, Y. (2015). Scaling Up Teacher Networks Across and Within European Schools: The Case of eTwinning. In: Looi, CK., Teh, L. (eds) Scaling Educational Innovations. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-537-2_11
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