What was your motivation for joining eTwinning?

Our motivation was to share learning experiences with students and teachers of European countries. The eTwinning project entitled “Crop circles challenge” brought together European schools to discuss and share their work in a fun way, focusing on the good use of ICT in maths teaching and integrating maths software (particularly open source software) in the mathematics curriculum in a meaningful way.

What were the most enjoyable and the most difficult aspects during the project?

The teacher partners set up a common collaborative event, a challenge among European students to reconstruct some crop circle formations using GeoGebra www.geogebra.at (an open source maths software programme), which was not too difficult and very intriguing.

The most enjoyable aspect for us was to see the students’ enthusiasm as they challenged themselves and each other to make new crop circles. The most difficult thing was to expand this project to other subjects and bring together teachers from different subjects and pupils from different classes.

How do you think that the eTwinning project added extra value to the “routine” school work?

The use of maths software to construct geometrical figures during the activities of the computer laboratory is a new method for teaching maths in an innovative way in order to give pupils and students a more active role in learning mathematics. They approached mathematical concepts and ideas in a joyful manner with very satisfactory results.

The task of the teachers’ group involved in the project was to create a friendly language and mathematics environment and to stimulate the students´ creativity to let them choose and construct their own maths tasks individually and together with European partners. Thus, the students’ personal creative ability has been and will be an asset.

What kind of impact has your participation had on other classes and/or schools and how can they benefit from your experience?

After our eTwinning experience and the Linz meeting, where we had the opportunity to show our project (using posters, brochures, and also on our websites), more and more European colleagues have joined us in the challenge.

Some of them translated the crop circles lesson plan (a paper with a brief introduction on how to start and construct crop circles and use the maths software programme Geogebra) into their European languages: English, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Romanian. We hope to broaden our project to more European schools, so we can facilitate the development of the eTwinning process and the use of open source software from a single teacher to teachers of other subjects in European schools.

After this project, what are your plans for the future (more similar kinds of projects, new approaches in teaching, etc.)?

We have recently requested Socrates funds for a multidisciplinary cross-curricular Comenius scholastic project involving Irish, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Belgian and English high schools for the next school years. This project will engage all pupils in the study of geometry, which will encompass an appreciation and an understanding of the diverse patterns that occur naturally or have evolved over time. In addition, the project aims to develop a friendly environment for content and language integrated learning (C.L.I.L) and a range of artefacts for exchange between the participating schools, thus bringing the linguistic heritage of the participating countries to the fore. Italian and Belgian eTwinning partners are also involved in a Minerva project known as “Com@net” (pre-proposal approved) regarding a diffusion of collaborative maths on the net.