Malta's First eTwinning Partner-Finding Fair

An Enriching Experience...

A few "posts" ago I wrote about how I had first started to deliver eTwinning Webinars for Maltese educators - http://amandaworkinglife.blogspot.com.mt/2016/05/delivering-etwinning-webinars.html - and how the process itself was a learning curve for both myself and the participants. I also wrote how, after a while, I had decided to "branch out" and offer to hold webinars jointly with my PSA - eTwinning Plus colleagues. (For those who are not in the know, eTwinning Plus countries are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Tunisia). Today (10 of June 2016) I have moderated the first ever Maltese-run eTwinning Partner Finding Fair, and it was one of the most enriching experiences in my whole eTwinning career.

Yes, I have run eTwinning webinars before, on a variety of topics. Yes, this was not the first time where I included teachers from eTwinning Plus countries. And no, the difference didn't lie in the fact that I used Adobe Connect for the first time (Webex license has run out and eTwinning now uses Adobe).

What really struck me was that all those educators - hailing from different and far away countries - all had one priority: they want to make the world a better place for their students, for the leaders of tomorrow. The project ideas discussed - which they have helpfully uploaded on a Tricider widget I had pre-prepared for them - all talk about how through education we can make the world a more peaceful place, how we can teach our students the sometimes lost values of tolerance and cultural understanding, how we can make children think about their rights and obligations as active citizens. The project ideas are all on the Tricider below - and if you are an eTwinner reading this, please feel free to add your idea or to join an existing project from the marvellous ones listed here....

And this, in a nutshell, is the beauty of eTwinning, and why I feel lucky to have dedicated the last seven years of my working life working with this action. eTwinners are optimists, they see the world as a better, more beautiful place: and what's more, they try to instill these values to the students in their classrooms. Because children aren't born racist or intolerant: children can be more open-minded than adults and they can surely teach us a lesson or two about living together in peace. eTwinning can be a driving force, a virtual place where all these different cultures in Europe and beyond come together, a place where we prepare our students to become the active citizens of tomorrow....a place where we all come together in peace.

That is the true meaning of eTwinning and I am ever so proud to be part of such a wonderful, positive, diverse online family of educators.