Schools in motion! Erasmus Project

Project Title

Schools in motion!

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

This project focused mainly on subjecs from the STEM area, but it also had a special interest in the study and training of foreign languages as well as in the link between the our educational institutions and the cultural environment of our towns.
From preliminary discussions the next step was to focus on a topic combining cultural, scientific and ITC knowledge but also to find a direct link to the cultural surroundings of each partner town or their region: the target were then scientific technological museums, the final goal an audiovisual guide (in the project simplified as audioguide) in two languages, English and each country’s own language. The topic was to be “motion and automotion”, thus the title “schools in motion”. The schools which finally joined the project come from Germany (Munich), Spain (Salamanca), Italy (Pescia), Croatia (Zadar), Turkey (Izmir) and Portugal (Aveiro). All schools had a special interest in promoting STEM subjects, furthermore they wanted to improve communication in foreign languages, above all in English. The whole project was based on close-knit teamwork, each team had to comply with one of the following tasks: evaluation (of location, of needs, of knowledge, of means and tools); creation (research, editorial tasks, recording, audiovisual editing, public relation); testing; monitoring; promoting; socializing. The innovative concept behind this project lay in the fact that students analysed needs and requirements of their fellow students from the participating schools before creating the audioguide for their hometown museum. Thus, students had to evaluate and collect relevant data from 5 schools before they could start on drafting a plan for their audiovisual guides. The main idea was for them to create an audioguide for their peer group. The project stressed the importance of basic competences in different subjects, from ITC to the knowledge of languages, but also on transversal skills, mainly the ones which can’t be measured and valued at school, such as creativity, research practice, data analysis and interpretation, interrogative questioning and synthesizing information, innovation, oral and written communication, public speaking and presenting, but also on initiative in problem-solving, critical thinking, self-learning, teamwork , i.e. collaboration, and leadership, planning, adaptability and perseverance. Furthermore, the project was based on the idea that through interaction, constant communication and mutual support students and teachers from different countries contributed to make a joint intellectual effort towards a European identity.
One of its objectives was to improve and enhance the students’ media and internet literacy and to expand their knowledge in the fields of technology (ITC) and physics. The work on the project also implied for teachers to compare teaching methodologies and active competence in field studies linked to media, technologies and physics, and, furthermore, to enable students and teachers to improve language competences in English as the common language of the project on two levels: on the one hand as a means of communication in a social context, on the other hand to deepen the knowledge in a topical context and improve the language skills by learning technical terminology. As the audioguides were recorded in English and mostly also in each partner’s language students refined the use of their own language, which in a global-oriented world is too often disregarded. Moreover, they had the possibility to learn the language of one of the partners. In a world of international exchanges, the ability to speak foreign languages is a factor for competitiveness. A special team was constituted by students and teachers who were in charge of monitoring the progress of the work as well as its quality. Students reported their findings in blog entries, whereas teachers kept in touch through whatsapp and eTwinning.
Furthermore, through this project students were meant to increase their civic awareness, ethical behaviour and mutual respect in a multicultural environment, thus they had the possibility to learn about the many facets which form our European being.
Beyond the purely school-oriented part the project successfully created a strong link to the culture departments of the partners’ towns, encouraging a lively collaboration with their museums. They achieved their goal by establishing a lasting link between schools and their cultural environment, so that they became partners through the creation of the special audioguides. Students were thus involved in a cultural process as main operators. Museums profited from this cooperation because they received a product created by students for their peer groups.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 130840 Eur

Project Coordinator

Oskar-von-Miller-Gymnasium & Country: DE

Project Partners

• IZMIR ANADOLU LISESI
• I.E.S. FEDERICO GARCÍA BERNALT
• Gimnazija Jurja Barakovica
• Agrupamento de Escolas de Aveiro
• ITC F.Marchi-Forti