eTwinning: A Social Network for Spanish Teachers<

eTwinning: A Social Network for Spanish Teachers

Hi, my name is Rosa and I've been a teacher in Scotland for quite some years now. I came to live here thanks to a grant I got as a conversation assistant and over time I validated my qualifications in order to work as a primary school teacher in Edinburgh. At the moment I am teaching in English, but due to the high immigration rate in the UK, I always have the challenge of teaching a new language to children who have just arrived and cannot speak English, which is the key language used in the education system. From my own experience as a foreign language student, Spanish teacher and primary school teacher, I always show a lot of empathy towards these children and apply all my knowledge in order to support them in this process of teaching/learning, which the ELE course has been really helpful for, especially when it comes to consolidating my knowledge and getting a qualification to back this up. Aside from the language you teach, I think it's important to use a method based on communication that comes from real life situations so that the student sees the result of the activities and feels motivated. For this reason, in this blog post I would like to mention a webpage that, as a British Council ambassador, seems important to spread the word about because it has been a great help to me for communicating with other schools in Spain. It is called eTwinning and it is a free social network just for teachers, where you can work on projects together with other schools in other countries, wherever in the world. The projects can be about anything; languages, science, culture… To motivate my students to learn Spanish, I have worked on a few projects with other schools such as one in Madrid and another in León, where we have exchanged postcards, videos and photos in Spanish and English. The children love this kind of experience and eagerly await any news from their pen pals on the other side of the continent.