Etwinning

Design and plan a project collaboratively

The first step to beginning to work on a project and perhaps one of the elements which most predict its success is the planning. It requires spending time which we are often not willing to devote to this task, preferring instead to let the pupils begin the activities and to improvise as the project develops.

The Spanish teacher Marta Pey from the Jaume Callis secondary school and her Lithuanian and Swedish partners did not want to leave room for improvisation in their project Our shared fashion mission. The teachers used a Wiki from PBWORKS, a perfect space in which to exchange ideas, to design and plan their project. In this case even the title of the project was the product of close collaboration which has marked the path to be followed.

The fact is that objectives, contents, activities, tools, groups of pupils, etc. are variables which later influence the quality of the projects, so that it is worth while thinking about them and achieving a good preliminary design. Later on, any plan can be modified and adapted to the difficulties and/or new suggestions which arise during its development, provided that there is good communication among the participants. In any case a project which is thought up by several people is always more creative than one that comes from just one teacher, with a determined idea, which the partners then join.

Coordinating a project with a Wiki offers innumerable advantages over the classic exchange of emails: it makes it simple to consult afterwards as the information is classified in the structure we have given to the pages and offers an overall image of the discussions. Videos, images or links as well as text, can be included to illustrate the ideas you want to share.

Don’t improvise. Plan your projects! Here you have the example of how this was done in Our shared fashion mission.

To see the results of this project you can visit its TwinSpace and its blog.