Teachers and students at Nottingham Girls’ Academy have been celebrating after being awarded the highly regarded British Council eTwinning National Award at the weekend. Teachers from across all four regions of the UK came together from Friday 27 September until Sunday 29 September 2019 to celebrate the 14th annual British Council eTwinning National Conference, which was held for the first time at The Crowne Plaza in Nottingham.

The eTwinning National Award ceremony took place at a Gala dinner on Saturday, recognising outstanding international projects led by UK schools. There were 12 awards presented across various categories and one award for the overall winning project.

To secure the award, the local school worked in partnership with IESO Sierra la Mesta, Santa Amalia in Spain to create a/an outstanding project using digital collaborative tools. The project entailed using languages to raise awareness about social issues that affect our society these days and scored highly against each criteria of the below pedagogical framework.

•           Pedagogical innovation

•           Curricular integration

•           Communication and exchange between partner schools

•           Collaboration between partner schools

•           Use of technology

•           Results, impact and documentation
 

eTwinning, the digital community for schools has seen over 700,000 teachers from 44 countries across Europe and beyond register since 2005. The programme is funded by the European Commission as part of the Erasmus+ programme and managed in the UK by the British Council. The eTwinning National Award is issued to schools that produce outstanding work as part of their eTwinning partnership.

Nazareth Mansilla Moreno, Coordinator of PSHE at Nottingham Girls’ Academy, said: “We are delighted to have been the awarded the eTwinning National Award. Everyone at Nottingham Girls’ has enjoyed working with IESO Sierra la Mesta on Global Smiles. To secure the eTwinning National Award is a real honour for the students and teachers who participated in the project. The eTwinning project has brought a wide range of skills, language learning and global awareness to students, parents and the whole school community involved in the fundraising events at the end of our project.” 

The judging panels comments for the winning project were:

“This smiley project is a very comprehensive, well planned and delivered eTwinning project. Using combined international teams, community involvement, with many aspects student led, it develops language skills while addressing current and pressing issues. High quality cross curricular activities supported by a very comprehensive resource set has added immensely to the quality, high impact outcomes achieved. This is a resource rich and highly impactful eTwinning project.”

David Tungate, Principal at Nottingham Girls’ Academy, said:

"We are thrilled that Nazareth's hardwork and dedication has been recognised in such a positive way. The project she has led has done so much to build strong, long lasting ties and friendships between our pupils and those in Spain. It helps them develop language but, more importantly, a much richer understanding of their shared views and approaches to social and global issues, despite their different backgrounds, cultures and countries. At a time when it can feel like we are pulling further away from the rest of Europe, it is so encouraging to see the next generation continue to build bridges anyway."