Documents 5.a: What is TwinSpace?

TwinSpace is the place for the project members, the space where planned activities are developed. Students and teachers are the main users of TwinSpace; they can contribute depending on their access profile.

TwinSpace is a private space, which can only be accessed by people who have been given permission by the administrators. It is designed to include those people who are not registered in the eTwinning platform, which allows students, parents or teachers working in the project to see what is happening.

The project coordinators’ imagination and a proper initial planning of both the project and the tasks are factors to guarantee that students will be involved from the start in their common work.

The content of the TwinSpace can be published totally or partly, depending on those in charge.

In previous units we mentioned that the colour for the teacher’s personal Desktop is orange; in this case, the colour for TwinSpace is blue. Here you can see some examples of what the public part of some completed TwinSpace projects looks like. If you click on the links you can browse the different activity pages.

                                                 http://new-twinspace.etwinning.net/web/p16724/home

                                          http://new-twinspace.etwinning.net/web/p34220/welcome

                                                http://new-twinspace.etwinning.net/web/p36727/welcome

Note that to the left of the three images you can see an activity index with titles that do not offer details to identify the author’s country. These are collaboration activity pages where the project partners have taken part. They can be organized into subjects, groups, historical periods, etc. The way the activity pages are presented is to be agreed by the project members.

In these examples there is a long list of activity pages; however, when the TwinSpace is accessed for the first time, it looks very different than the ones shown above; everything is yet to be done and it looks slightly barren.

The space for Activities is empty; now is the time to start a collaborative adventure amongst teachers and students from different countries, for mutual enrichment.

In addition, the first time you Access TwinSpace it will probably show some words in English. This should not pose a problem for teachers who do not speak it. Later on, we will see how to select the language in Twinspace depending on what each user wants (Go to documents 5.c).

Note: the eTwinning platform is being constantly updated, so the translations may not be simultaneous to the best techniques used.

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Next: Documents 5.b: Access the project Twinspace