Brussels, 17/01/2005 (Agence Europe) - On Friday the European Commission represented by European Commissioner for education, culture and multilingualism, Jan Figel, officially launched its "e-Twinning action. This launch was the subject of a three day conference in Brussels which brought together 300 teachers from all over the EU, as well as Iceland and Norway, including some representatives from national and European teaching authorities.
Funded by the Commission as part of the eLearning 2004-06 programme, the eTwinning action aims to organise school twinning through the internet and hopes to get around 30,000 schools involved by 2007. The European Assistance Bureau (EAB) and National Assistance Bureaux (NAN) will be in charge of ensuring the action works in practice by getting different services on board, such as the training programmes conference organisation, as well as the implementation of internet portals. In practice, the goal of the action is to promote partnership between at least two schools from two different European countries which will organise teaching activities together through use of the TIC. The eTwinning (http: //http://www.etwinning.net ) is available in 20 languages and will be the pivot for this action. It will provide the schools involved with information and advice in order to prepare for the activities put forward and for finding the most suitable partners. It will also provide multilingual areas for communicating and collaborating on-line. Thanks to this action, pupils and teachers will acquire better knowledge of their respective differences and their teaching cultures while exchanging competencies in TIC. E-Twinning is also an excellent opportunity for schools to elaborate the network they have been building with the goal of building a multilingual and multicultural society. Commissioner Figel pointed out that the EU did not only have the goal of economic and political partnership but also that of linking Member States together on a level of their moral values through European history, respect for human dignity and cultural difference. Initiatives such as the eTwinning action will help strengthen the diffusion of these values and help make good the lack of communication and understanding between European citizens, he stressed. The Commissioner, however, agreed that certain schools in new Member States could be at a disadvantage when it came to participating in the eTwinning because of their lack of information technology. He therefore highlighted that at a European level there was a need to invest more in technology and pursue via education the objectives set out by Member States, namely creating a quality education system and centres of excellence in the goal of reaching the Lisbon objectives and making European the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.