Brussels, 17/01/2006 (Agence Europe) - In Linz on 13 January, Education Commissioner, Ján Figel' and Austrian Education, Science and Culture Minister Elisabeth Gehrer presented the “eTwinning” prizes to the six winners.
In the “School collaboration” category, “Talking through time” won in the 5-12 age group and “Newspaper on the Internet encourages the learning of the German language” took first prize in the 13-19 age group. The first project involved the exchange of teaching materials to help young children learn about World War Two; the latter project was a collaborative effort between young Germans and Slovaks to produce a daily online newspaper dealing with current topics from both countries.
In the “Pedagogical innovation” category, the 5-12 age group was won by “Learning and Sharing” and the prize in the 13-19 age group went to “Europe Learning School”. The first of these two projects between schoolchildren in Finland and Norway had the goal of creating personal connections and friendship and to enhance their English language knowledge and ICT skills; the second aimed to develop a network of long distance exchanges between students and French-speaking teachers to generate ideas on the role of culture, education and schools in tomorrow's Europe.
Finally in the “Digital resources” category “Playing and Learning” took first prize for 5-12 year olds and “Crop Circles Challenge” came out on top among the older age group. The first project sought an exchange of information on how best to teach a foreign language to young children; the second challenged students to reconstruct crop circles, geometric patterns made in fields of cereals, using the “GeoGebra” maths software.
In less than a year, more than 11,000 primary and secondary schools registered on the eTwinning portal. eTwinning, a European initiative, is part of the “eLearning” programme to promote school partnerships on the Internet. Almost 2000 of these schools are already involved in joint projects. “These figures prove that phenomenal results can be obtained with very simple means”, said Commissioner Figel'. eTwinning is a free service and those taking part do not have to go through any long or complicated administrative procedure. “I believe that it is a very effective way of promoting ITC use and linguistic and inter-cultural competence in school education,” added the Commissioner.
(for further information: http: //http://www.etwinning.net )