Angela Zeama: Thanks to eTwinning, I can’t afford to be lazy, I’m constantly working and developing.

Angela ZEAMA, history and civic education teacher, Lyceum ‚Constantin Stere’, Soroca city

You know, most of the time, we humans are looking for the easiest way. This is our instinct, because we think life will be easier. I gave up this instinct 5 years ago when I decided to join the eTwinning platform. It’s been almost 30 years since I’m a history and civic education teacher, but the last five years have been the most intense. I’m an adventurer by nature. We historians dig, search and explore, and eTwinning was a challenge to explore more, find new things and develop myself. It is true that it was a new field, and it frightened me in the beginning. It is a field requiring knowledge of IT and English, and besides, there were also thoughts like “Why do I need additional occupations and headaches?” in my head. But, as I said, I’m adventurous, and I ventured into this path called eTwinning.

Fellow teachers from the lyceum helped me. The first eTwinner I worked with was a history teacher from Poland, recommended by a colleague of mine. It was an ambitious project between Poland, Moldova, Lithuania and Ukraine. We entitled it ‚We and you Europeans’. I worked with the 12th grade, and it was an exciting experience. It was very interesting for the pupils to chat on Skype with the pupils from the other three countries, while I learned a lot of new things at professional and personal level. We were awarded European Quality Label for this project.

Do you still remember the sensation of fear I’ve mentioned above? Well, now, I’m doing so many things on my computer that I’d never have thought that I could do it. It wasn’t so difficult after all. And no matter what, we will all recognize that a pupil wants to see a teacher who knows how to use a computer and, like the pupil, will be able to make a more special presentation and speak in the same terms. If this happens, then anyway you keep расе with them, and you build a different teacher-pupil relationship. So, all together we go beyond the school, participate in projects, make presentations, both in the country and abroad.

From 2013 till now, I participated in eight eTwinning projects, and I was the founder in one of them. It was a joint project with several schools from Romania, and the idea was to show that we are the same people, we have the same history and we speak the same language. A total of seven schools from Romania and the Republic of Moldova participated in the project.

Thanks to the eTwinning platform, I can’t afford to be lazy. I always have to be at my best, read, document, explore and experiment, because it is the only way to grow both professionally and personally. Indeed, eTwinning is professional growth, discovery of something new, a window to Europe, because this is how we learn many things, which we couldn’t have learned in another way.