The etwinning website holds the joint materials from both schools, from bulletin board conversations, to displays of images created by the children and uploaded files – for example, the children at Backworth Park made mp3 sound recordings of themselves talking in order to help the Spanish children learn English. They also wrote transcripts of their recordings, which were placed alongside each sound file, in case the Geordie accent proved difficult to follow!

Each school produced its own versions of the calendars using materials from each country, which have been printed out, the covers laminated and then spiral bound.

Although the Spanish children did not upload their final pages, they provided images which the English children incorporated into their calendars. A point of learning for the teachers was to reconsider timescales for the work!

The children were surprised and delighted to find they had many things in common with the group of Spanish children; pets, friends, family and interests were found to be similar, while food was a little different. Unfortunately the short time scale of the project didn’t allow the children to follow up all the questions generated by communicating with their new friends. It has, however whetted our appetites for another project next year.

At Backworth Park, the children did a lot of collaborative work between themselves, starting by agreeing on general formats. They made their own design decisions about their calendar pages and made constructive criticism of each other’s work before finalising designs. Children were able to choose which software they used to produce their images; some combined elements from several programs to achieve their designs. Each child saved their work into a common folder so they had a selection of different designs to choose from to compile a complete calendar. The images from the Spanish children were incorporated into the selection, to create our joint calendars.

ICT Skills

· drafting and editing work

· saving to a common folder

· creating calendar pages for a specified month and year

· inserting pages and compiling work from other children into their own document by copying and pasting objects from shared Publisher files to their own Publisher file

· navigating the network

· manipulating digital photographs in a painting program

· combining images, text and decorative objects to make a pleasing design which was fit for purpose (i.e. appropriate for a calendar)

· recording themselves speaking

· downloading the mp3 files and saving them to a computer

· becoming aware of copyright issues regarding images from the internet, and creating their own instead

· learning about e-safety, particularly in respect of giving out personal details to people who you don’t know (e.g. we only used first names, and didn’t attach names to images)

· learning about secure websites such as etwinning.net, and the difference between working in a space like this compared with other sites such as MySpace.

The progress that children made was in becoming able to call upon a wide range of skills to contribute to a multimedia, multi-tasked, multi-staged project, which required them to make decisions, work together and operate in an environment more like a genuine workplace than a traditional classroom. Skills were shared as required, opinions sought and agreements negotiated. The two teachers were able to operate as facilitators rather than directors of the project, and the children rose to the occasion by cooperating in a very grown-up fashion.