Description of the activity:

In this LTT, six students and two teachers from each partner countries came together to produce the graphic design of the story book and to discuss the procedure the digital book written by the sudents will be disseminated. As ITCG deffenu, in Olbia, Sardinia is a vocational school specilalized in IT, it has got experience in book design and has a number of availlable labs at school. Graphic design is the process of visual communication using one or more of typography, photography and illustration. Designers combine symbols, images and text to form visual representations of ideas and messages. The stories created in 2nd LTT and illustrated in the 3rd LTT were combined in this session. The students were paired by host country before the LTT and had some experience in graphic design tools/programmes as before this LTT, Italy offered a computer program and the name of the program was discussed about in the 3rd LTT. On the 1st day of the LTT, the host students led a conference in which they shared their visit to a refugee NGO in their countries and talked about their experiences. After this, the participant students came together with their pairs to organize typography, visuals and page layout techniques to create visual compositions of the book. Before attending this LTT, the students from all countries were trained by a graphic designer/ teacher in their own countries and got used to the graphic design techniques and the designing process itself. The Designing process involved lasted four sessions.

To ensure the quality of the final product, a specifc computer program i.e. Corel Draw was integrated into the curriculum of the ICT lessons in the participating schools. At the end of this LTT, the books were completed and it has been agreed to published in a digital format. The procedure of the reading sessions involving reading the stories to primary school pupils was clearly stated, the necessary permisions were taken and the participants were informed about this data gathering procedure as vital to produce a proper action research article. The responsibles of introduction, methodology, results and discussions and conclusion parts were specified in this LTT.

We assumed that virtual exchanges through etwinning is a complement to the physical mobilities in order to better prepare and follow-up students before, during and after the exchange. The students and teachers shared some tutorials on the forum pages of twinspace on how to make graphic design and there were some asynchronous discussions of the students. The names of the participating students were announced six weeks before the meeting and Designing pairs had been formed by the host country before attending the meeting so each pair had a chance to get in touch before meeting. Also, all the in school preparations were photographed and shared on twinspace. The minutes of the transnational meeting, the photos and the final work were shared on twinspace. In the previous etwining project "Stories to be told", this phase was skipped and all graphic design of the stories was done by teachers, that is the participant students couldn't be given a chance to show, enrich and evaluate their ICT skills.

Benefits for the involved participants

The participants are going to get benefit from this LTT by enhancing their digital competence, communication skills in foreign language, and their entrepreneurship / sense of initiative, which are among the key competences for life long learning. Adopted by the European Parliament and the Council in 2006, the digital competence involves the confident and critical use of Information Society Technology (IST) for work, leisure and communication. Graphics and visualisations provide us with a method to use images to describe a story in a way that we can understand. As one of the main targets, if children want to comprehend the world around them, they can do it with the help of graphics. Many studies state that the children shown the pictures were more likely to retain and absorb that information and recall it later. So in this LTT, it was expected that the participants had a critical, reflective attitude towards the information available and a responsible use of the interactive media to design books to make them stimulating, charming and educational for the child. They used their digital ability for cultural, social and for their future professional purposes.