Odysseus goes Portugal

The ten-day long Learning Odyssey that Bart and I were running in the eTwinning Learning Lab moved from the virtual to the real world in Portugal last week. At the annual eTwinning conference, held in Lisbon, we delivered two workshops about The Pedagogical Value of eTwinning projects.

The workshops were well received by the teachers who wanted to learn more not only about the web 2.0 tools that they can use in their eTwinning projects, but also about the pedagogy behind the tools (or ahead of the tools). We received fantastic feedback and I'm still over the moon about it, because so many teachers approached us after the workshops to tell us that our sessions were the best or among the best sessions of the entire conference.  Also, after the first workshop the good word about what we did and how we presented this topic spread around and we were asked to let in some other teachers who hadn't previously signed up for our workshops.

What the teachers liked most about the workshops (and so did we) was that they were full of surprises,  just like  Odysseus' voyage was full of unexpected twists and turns – however, in our Learning Odyssey, all the surprises were more than pleasant, from beautiful sandy beaches, Nutella jars and TTYPs to  exit slips, treasure troves and  sailor's wisdom for eTwinners.

The PORTalisbon is now in a safe harbor but ready to set sail to new, still undiscovered learning beaches and treasure islands.