Change your life open your mind Erasmus Project

Project Title

Change your life open your mind

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

This project was an attempt to achieve the early awareness of our primary school students towards the natural diversity in the world. Influenced by the refugee crisis, we thought it was vital for teachers to remember their role as educators in general, as reformers of characters, as promoters of values and human rights, as open minded people who have to inculcate in their pupils the respect for other cultures, a positive attitude towards people of other religions, countries and with different life style.
Bearing these in mind we organized a series of activities with our partner schools from Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Turkey.The activities were designed bearing in mind the needs of the students, their age and the different circumstances they confront in their countries (economic crisis, lack of safety, unequal education opportunities, rural or urban areas). We accustomed the children to social and civil skills, holidays and festivities and raised their awareness on social inclusion and how this can be achieved through educators who tried hard to be the role models for their students.
All partners were involved in decision making, they cooperated with their colleagues at school and involved parents, members of their community and other people outside schools they thought could help them implement and disseminate our project. With online meetings, eTwinning activities, card and letter exchange among our students, and teachers’ and students’ mobilities we managed to develop a sense of belonging to the European multicultural community. Both teachers and children had the opportunity to be creative, to develop their talents, to express themselves in a better way and to feel successful in the most natural and funny way. The development of teachers was achieved by sharing strategies, resources and good practices and presenting these via learning resources, thus increasing professional effectiveness, exposure to innovative teaching activities. We succeeded to improve and develop skills and competences like critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration across networks, agility and adaptability, effective oral and written communication, curiosity and imagination. By starting from the basic and trying to achieve creativity and innovation we exposed the students to different sources on human rights and material relevant to our topic (videos, interviews) and provoked them in order to mobilize their emotional intelligence.
It was our intention from the very beginning to promote the use of ICT to acquire and enhance digital skills and we did it more than expected since the corona virus pandemic made this use even more imperative. We established a project in the eTwinning platform in which the pupils would be able to present their cities, villages, home places, to children from other countries. Our intention was to guide them through culture, history, architecture, art and literature and cultivate the European Citizen identity and the sense of empathy. Most importantly, we achieved to realize the innovative basis of our project, a Virtual Learning Moodle Platform using open source software, available to all school departments. In this platform we uploaded the material produced by teachers in all five schools who cooperated extremely well. More specifically we involved our students in reading a book called “The boy at the back of the class” referring to a refugee kid’s life in order to create an awareness of the difficulties experienced by children of a similar age and class.
The three mobilities were the flagship of our project. The acquaintance with people from different cultures, the use of the English language as a means of communication and the extraordinary activities (parades, workshops, visiting museums and archaeological sites, tasting local food) organized by the hosting schools exposed teachers, pupils and parents to so much info that no source can provide.
Finally dissemination was achieved with announcements made in our school official websites, a Facebook account in which parents could follow our activities throughout the project, school events in which parents volunteered to help us, press article released, school newspapers and magazines, seminars organized by the school advisor for colleagues from other schools, videos, teacher-coordinator’s personal blog in which 60 teachers visited the post including the link to the produced material, radio interview, and a website created (CLOM.eu) where someone can find almost everything we did with our students to implement the project and achieved throughout our cooperation.
Finally, for the evaluation of the project we used observation and monitoring for systematic data collection as well as a number of questionnaires distributed to parents and colleagues in order to evaluate the whole effort and the produced material is available to anyone interested to use it .

Project Website

http://clom.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 80037,39 Eur

Project Coordinator

1st experimental primary school of Thessaloniki & Country: EL

Project Partners

• IC “G. Pagoto”
• 19 MAYIS ILKOKULU
• Colégio Astória, SA
• Scoil Bhride, Shantalla.