Tips and advice for TwinSpace

TwinSpace is an excellent place for partners to communicate and to develop activities within an eTwinning project. In the National Support Service site you will find many tutorials and guides that will help you to make the most of all your possibilities. In addition, there are some tips and pieces of advice that will allow us to make a better use of the platform. Here are some of them:

Activities and tools

• Consider TwinSpace as a classroom. Once you organise groups to work in teams, you do not have to bear in mind whether students are at the same school or not, only their similarities, interests or skills. Communication tools in TwinSpace allow us to work in cooperation, regardless of the distance. When you organise the students, encourage for the creation of mixed nationality teams.
• Wikis are the perfect tool to work cooperatively from different places; they allow various members of the team to work on a common document and to comment on it. In addition, the "History" section in each page of a wiki allows us to know what individual contributions have been made and when, which helps towards teacher control over each student’s involvement. Make the most of it!
• In the current version of TwinSpace, the activity pages are shown in chronological order depending on their date of creation. Sometimes, this order does not coincide with the real development of the project. In these cases, it would be advisable to rename the pages by adding the order in which the activities have been carried out at the beginning. This will help anyone to understand the project.
• When we name an activity page, we can choose the font, size, colour, etc. We can even add links in the title itself. You only have to insert the corresponding html codes. You can find some examples of these codes in http://www.w3schools.com/html/ or in http://www.devx.com/projectcool/Article/19816.
• If you happen to delete a tool accidentally, don't worry! If you install it in the same page again, all the contents will be automatically recovered.

Privacy

• Some pages can never become public (Teacher's Room, Student's Corner, homepage, chat). If you wish to show any final product or debate, you must do it in the activity page.
• You can use the Student's Corner to allow students to exchange personal information and only project members can access. It is also advisable to allow them to manage their own space, so you will have to create some users with the student-administrator profile (see below).

Users

• Before inviting a teacher into TwinSpace, think whether it is better to suggest registering in eTwinning and adding them as associate partners in the desktop. This way, they will have access to other tools such as the Project Diary and they can share all the official acknowledgements given to the project (quality labels, awards...)
• When an associate partner is annexed to the project, the platform will include it in TwinSpace as a teacher-member. If you want that partner to have greater power to manage the project, you should change their profile to teacher-administrator.
• There are 5 different profiles in TwinSpace. The main difference is that only administrators (teachers or students) can create activity pages and implement or delete tools. The teachers-administrators are the only ones who can invite or delete members of the project, change the profiles and decide what is published and what is kept private.
• Use the visitor's profile so that parents can learn about the project and see how the students work. It is also useful for managers or other colleagues who are interested in eTwinning.
• Be careful when you delete users: you may happen to accidentally delete yourself.