eTwinning is a programme of the European Union, which aims to connect schools all over Europe using the internet. German schools can find a partner school via eTwinning and work together on a chosen project in a secure virtual environment.

The Shakespeare Players and M Theatre from Merthyr Tydfil have used these platforms in their joint work in recent years and undertaken four projects called Drama and more, Devising Theatre, Taming the Shrew and Treachery and Tragedy - the Play for Power in Hamlet and Julius Caesar, which all got Twin Label certificates.

Our Hamlet production in 2012 was also part of a bigger international project called The TO BE Experience, which was carried out to intensify the study of the play Hamlet and allow students to experience Shakespeare in a more interactive way. Six schools in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Germany with over 100 students and six teachers worked on this enterprise throughout the school year 2011-2012.

On September 28th 2012 the German jury gave our project a national quality label, which is awarded to outstanding and excellent work and includes prizes and special awards! And on October 22th 2012 we were awarded the European quality label as well (see download below)!

The links for eTwinning's online platform, the Twin Space and the accompanying blog, showed the great variety of the creative tasks and products of the European students.

There was an Illustrated Timeline/Mindmap of Shakespeare's Life, a collection of Hamlet Versions online, Summaries and Book Covers for the play, creative writing tasks like Newspapers, Diary Entries, a Hamlet Comic, Bio poems, Cooperative Writing, a Quiz, Poems and Songs for Ophelia, drawings and much much more.

As a winner of the European quality label, we were also presented as exemplary on the eTwinning Website.

The Shakespeare Players' contribution was to perform the play and produce photos and a poster, Ophelia's Song and video clips from rehearsals (Hamlet's monologue and fencing practice, see the eTwinning Blog).

Here are some examples of what the other pupils did:

A mind map informing on the contents of the play