Challenge as a Modern Pedagogical Tool Erasmus Project

Project Title

Challenge as a Modern Pedagogical Tool

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: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Challenge as a Modern Pedagogical Tool aimed to develop students’ and teachers’ competences and modernize education in a wider scale by integrating challenges and modern approaches into education. Before inventing this project, different challenges had become very popular among people of all ages. Testing challenges in education and seeing their great potential led us to create the project.
The project consisted of different challenges both for students and teachers. Participants were able to choose from a variety of challenges as well as challenge others with new challenges. Challenges for students were based on curriculum, however, they were open so that they were both effective as well as motivating for everyone. Students worked on challenges based on creativity, use of modern technologies and problem solving on their own and in school or international teams. Videos in English about achieving challenges were shared on-line. There were various challenges for international teams during learning activities, too.
Teachers were challenged to integrate modern approaches and ICT into their education. The project team created an on-line handbook for teachers European Teachers in Action which contains over 150 pages and which is focused on sharing experience, useful tools, apps and websites and international projects.
Modern forms of evaluation such as experience forms or badges were tried, too.
Schools from the Czech Republic, Turkey, Poland, Croatia and Portugal took part in the project.
All the participating schools belong to the ones looking for ways to adapt modern ways of teaching and learning because we believe today’s education must be focused on 21st century skills and competences in order to prepare our students for their lives and employability. Therefore we set up a team of European teachers with different ICT skills and experience, background and school equipment who were enthusiastic about modernizing current ways of teaching. Teachers learned, formed, experienced and shared modern approaches and learned how to adapt them on their own in the future. It is very important that five different European schools were involved as it was one of the main preconditions to make our project efficient and available to as many people and inspire and influence a wider audience throughout Europe.

Modernizing our teaching has had an important impact on teachers, but, first of all, It was a crucial opportunity for students to develop new competences and discover Europe with European friends.

The project addressed these main objectives:
– Learn, develop and integrate new ways of teaching such as challenges, using ICT, gamification and new forms of evaluation or game-based learning.
– Share experience, enrich each other and develop new ideas in a team of European teachers.
– Inspire teachers and other stakeholders throughout Europe.
– Develop students’ 21st century skills and competences by working on challenging tasks requiring creativity, collaboration with students from different European countries, using ICT, critical thinking, problem solving, peer reviewing, presenting and evaluating outcomes and processes.
– Let students discover Europe by collaborating with European peers, staying in hosting families, visiting partner schools, learning about different cultures and traditions, sharing materials (such as videos about participating countries) created by European teenagers.
– Let students experience diverse and still similar Europe, discuss European and multicultural topics and think in European context.
– Learn about countries we live in thanks to working on tasks aiming to introduce our states.
– Give participants an opportunity to make friends from different European countries.
– Show the importance of English (and foreign languages in general) thanks to the fact English will be used when working on all the activities, motivate students to learn foreign languages.
– Develop language skills by on-line communication, creating outcomes in English and face-to-face meetings in different countries.
– Create outcomes that will be available to a wider audience such as a handbook for teachers, project website with different outcomes and information, Interactive European Pathways or interactive book Let’s Discover showing Europe from different points of view in an interactive way.
– Bring European dimension to participating schools and local communities.
– Extend the impact by a wide range of dissemination activities.
– Involve students with fewer opportunities for whom it is more complicated to participate in similar activities.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 131730 Eur

Project Coordinator

Zakladni skola T. G. Masaryka Borohradek, prispevkova organizace & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• Osnovna skola Jurja Sizgorica
• Publiczna Szkola Podstawowa Nr 4 z Oddzialami Integracyjnymi im. sw. Kazimierza Jagiellonczyka
• Escola Secundária de Palmela
• GAZI ÜNIVERSITESI VAKFI ÖZEL ORTAOKULU