Our facilitators started the session with a warming-up activity. The idea of it was to enable the participants to get acquainted with each other. Then Neil and Tatyana addressed to the audience with a question: What are e-projects? Among the answers there were such as collaborative, communicative, creative, national, international, and mutually beneficial.
After that one group of the participants made a list of advantages using E-projects at school or university and another group, on the contrary, a list of disadvantages. As for the advantages the participants considered these ones the most important:

• such projects bring pupils together
• students share ideas
• students have opportunities for cross-cultural communication
• pupils gain knowledge about a subject under study
• it is learner-oriented
• students gain the skills necessary for collaboration later at work with their colleagues abroad.

The disadvantages were the following:

• learners are independent and they can make mistakes
• e-project participants can experience technological problemsit’s usually time-consuming for a teacher to moderate
• it’s difficult for a teacher to evaluate each student’s contribution into the project.

Having discussed the pros and cons of the e-projects the participants moved onto thinking about their own e-projects, the projects they have already held with their pupils / students or the projects they would like to have. Here are some examples of the e-projects given by the participants:

• Global Understanding by Alla
• School of My Dream by Galina
• E-mailing and Webquests by Kate
• On-line Learning Centre for Grown-ups by Christine
• Negative Weather and Project of the Future (new school year) by Lidia
• Automobiles: Friends or Foes. Self-Help Book by Svetlana
• My Native Town by Olga
• Creating a Wiki Magazine by Neil

The participants shared their experience, exchanged information on e-projects and demonstrated some web pages where everyone could see the content of the e-project. For example, Alla Nazarenko from the Moscow State University spoke about ‘Global Understanding’ project initiated by East Carolina University. It is designed for university students. So if you are interested in it, please, contact the project organisers (http://www.ecu.edu/cs-acad/globalinitiatives/course.cfm).
Here are some other useful links:
www.e-languages.org
www.macmillan.ru (Webinars)
www.v-class.ru (Webinars)
www.visitlondon.com (for Webquests)