We wanted to create awareness and foster a critical view and way of thinking among our students regarding the news and information they continuously receive on the internet. We wanted to encourage the practice of various digital tools, some of which are already known but may be little mastered or not mastered enough, as well as introduce completely new tools. We wanted to enable young people to engage in virtual and physical exchanges within their class group and with international groups, allowing them to reconnect with the "collective" and real-life situations. We wanted to produce a medium that can be easily accessed online and re-used by all types of audiences, both internal and external to the school. We wanted to develope our students' English skills by visiting each other and having English as a common language.
The global pandemic that we experienced over the last 3 years has highlighted several problems: - social networks have relayed a multitude of false information: "fake news". Their impact on people's minds has sometimes been deleterious, often leading to a questioning of proven scientific facts and a suspicion of manipulation of public opinion. Participating schools aimed to create awareness among students about false information and teach them how to recognise and cope with fake information in their daily lifes. The myth of the "digital natives", portraying young people are naturally skilled in digital technology, has been debunked. While teenagers excel in social media usage, they struggle with basic software like word processing or publishing tools. While working together in an eTwinning project on fake news, we wanted to make the learning more interactive and real by visiting a partner. While discovering eachothers culture, it was easier to exchange the knowledge we already had and to work on our final products: a magazine, a song and a podcast. By visiting each others schools, teachers got a better view on the way their colleagues work in another European country.