‘eTwinning for future teachers’ experience at the Primary Education Course of Study at the University of Florence

In a multicultural and international world where cooperation, sustainable activities, learning, and teaching processes are improving, new teachers can face challenges while building the necessary skills to achieve these improvements. 

The added value of eTwinning for student teachers is multifaceted, but the main aspect is in the improvement of foreign languages (especially English) and the use of ICT.  eTwinning for future teachers focuses a lot on cross-curricular approaches (Agenda 2030 or European citizenship) and interactive and effective methodologies such as problem solving, peer education, and cooperative learning. The emphasis it puts on inclusion and recognising everyone’s needs and rights is also noteworthy.

We began working on eTwinning and TTI (which is what eTwinning for future teachers was called at the time) in 2019 when we started working as teacher educators at the Primary Education Course of Study at the University of Florence. From the start, we tried to combine a lot of different perspectives and extensively plan a wide range of activities that would involve and engage all participants.

We were only partially familiar with the eTwinning platform. Later, we had the opportunity to go to Salerno to our first national meeting. It was truly a very interesting, fun, and cooperative experience where good practices were exchanged between professors, teacher educators, and student teachers.

This experience made us certain that eTwinning is important in the path of future teachers to improve their digital skills, knowledge of English, and spirit of collaboration. 

We developed our competencies through several events and meetings that we organised with the help of eTwinning ambassadors and regional and national agencies (Usr, Indire). At these widely attended events, various workshops were planned for participants’ different school levels (nursery or primary). 

All these experiences gave us the proper knowledge for our traineeship meetings with the students. During these meetings, we familiarised them with the platform tools and set them a few real projects based on activities in various eTwinning kits. We created and implemented good practices and achieved the aims expected. Student teachers posted their work on the TwinSpaces we prepared for them (Let’s play and Learn, Becoming Teachers). Our last eTwinning meeting with the students was just before the pandemic lockdown, on 28 February 2020.  We had a very productive on-site workshop with our students.  We all celebrated together by going out. Even for a long time after the meeting, when we were presenting all our lessons via remote video calls, we recalled that traineeship session as a very pleasant one; a memory that helped us focus on the things we learned together and overcome the difficult time of the pandemic. 

One of those students created an outstanding project called ‘BeeLovers’, which was selected to be presented at the 2020 eTwinning Annual Conference.

We have been involved with eTwinning for future teachers for a long time. Any time we are asked what we did to get the Initial Teacher Education Award 2022, we always stress the importance of continuous effort and positive collaboration among everyone, teachers, students, professors at the University (in particular, Professor Mancini for implementing the project and Professor Ranieri for the research outputs), and the institutions involved.