Etwinning

How to use the Project Diary

Whenever we start a project, eTwinning provides us with two tools that are essential to development: the TwinSpace - the place where all participants, teachers and students interact - and the Project Diary. The latter is a blog for teachers who are part of a project to post their plans and comments about their progress and the difficulties encountered throughout the development of the project.

In addition to this, it can also be used to contact the eTwinning National Support Service in Spain (in the case of Spanish project members) and to get their counseling and technical and pedagogical support regarding the project. Therefore, it is not a tool to carry out the activities or publish the materials created, but rather to discover the most relevant activities, reflect the work process and pose possible doubts regarding the National Support Service.

Each article or item published in the Project Diary may include images of up to 4 megabytes, in JPG/JPEG or GIF formats and be published in four different levels of privacy:

• Private: Only the author and the National Support Service can see it.
• Restricted: Only those users who have registered in eTwinning can see it.
• Public: Everyone can see it.
• Hidden: Nobody can see it.

These options allow us to classify the privacy levels of the posts made. For instance, to describe an interesting activity that participants have particularly enjoyed, we must post the article in the public level and so allow it to be seen by everyone. However, should one of the members not know how to use a tool, it will be better to make a private entry, as it will be enough for just the teacher involved and the National Support Service to review and establish the communication triggered with this entry. At this regard, we must bear in mind that, even if the National Support Service reviews all entries periodically, it will preferably reply to the private ones.

On the other hand, regular publishing in the Project Diary describing the progress of the work provides this tool with another function: becoming an excellent document for permanent assessment once the project has ended.

This videotutorial shows us how to use the Project Diary: