culture tour guide “My town – My culture” – a website for young foreigners Erasmus Project

Project Title

culture tour guide “My town – My culture” – a website for young foreigners

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: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage

Project Summary

Nine out of ten Europeans are of the opinion that cultural heritage should be taught at school (https://www.etwinning.net/de/pub/index.htm). Taking that into account and in context of the European Year of Cultural Heritage our project’s idea was to make the students of each school aware of their own culture as well as of that of the other participating schools. In order to do so our students developed a digital means (website, app) for young guests (e.g. exchange students, tourists and refugees) that presents cultural sights and peculiarities of each involved town. The focus was on increasing the cultural awareness by getting to know the other culture. This information by young people for young people should show how to experience culture in an easy and low budget way. Furthermore our students increased their foreign language skills by communicating with each other and translating the content of the website into English. A last effect was the improvement of IT and media skills of the involved students (e.g. webdesign, photography, layout).
We are four different vocational schools from the Hranice (CZE), Koblenz (GER), Opole (POL) and Rome (ITA) of which each school was responsible for one of our four main objectives (foreign languages (Rome), webdesign (Opole), cultural awareness (Koblenz) and marketing (Hranice)). One of the project’s aim was to raise our students’ awareness of cultural differences. In order to do so we created a website (English and national language (only in parts due to Covid 19)) for each school which informs young people about cultural highlights of the school’s town. There were two meetings (in Koblenz and Rome) which were used to work on the websites and critically evaluate the content by testing it in groups including all involved nationalities. In addition, we had sessions with games and exercises raising the awareness of cultural differences and teaching an appropriate way of dealing with them. After the second meeting we could only proceed online as travelling restrictions made meetings impossible. In addition, we had to change the objectives of our project as well as the layout of our webpage as in certain phases the Covid 19 situation was so serious that working on the project was impossible. Another problem was that planning ahead due to the constant changes at each school was extremely difficult.
Public dissemination of the results on special occasions such as open days, fairs etc. was also impossible. We plan to do so after the end of the project when public events are possible again. Thus we could only concentrate on spreading the information within our schools and trying to inform the local press.
The most important result of our project is our website which should in the long run be used in further exchanges of the involved schools. Due to the problems we will have to add more information than initially expected. Some of the involved schools teach refugee classes which could also make use of the website. Finally, we will try to present the website to the tourist information centres of our cities and will also promote the websites outside our schools. In addition, we want to provide a framework of the webpage that can be used by schools which did not take part in the project. They will have the opportunity to use the structure of our website to create their own website to inform about their own city.

Project Website

http://erasmus-tourguide.jimdofree.com

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 55611,7 Eur

Project Coordinator

Julius-Wegeler-Schule, BBS Koblenz & Country: DE

Project Partners

• STREDNI ODBORNA SKOLA HRANICE, skolska pravnicka osoba
• Zespol Szkol Ekonomicznych im. Generala Stefana Roweckiego “Grota”
• ISTITUTO TECNICO COMMERCIALE LUCIO LOMBARDO RADICE