Discover and share your identity mark Erasmus Project

Project Title

Discover and share your identity mark

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: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The project “Discover and Share your Identity Mark“ was a two-year long project although due to the coronavirus, it was extended for another nine months. The schools involved in the project are I.E.S Elexalde School, a secondary school in Galdakao, the Basque Country and a junior high school in Katerini, Greece. English was the language of communication. It was addressed at students of 14 years old.
The project was submitted in response to a need to open our schools through internationalisation to new realities different from the local contexts.
Our students’ cognitive and non cognitive abilities as well as all the competences required in our global world were developed in the project . At the same time, we also disseminated European culture and students’ intercultural awareness.

The choice of it was based on the fact that, as 2018 was the European Year of Cultural Heritage and we are European citizens, we believed that our students’ learning from their own national identity, as well as from that of other members of the European Union Community and their ability to transmit it could enrich them.
The project’s main objective was to raise consciousness on their own heritage, discover a new one and share it with a tolerant and respectful mind.
Besides, the collaboration of the two schools in the project opened us a unique window of opportunities to achieve high levels of interaction, communication and exchange of ideas, as well as improvement of the English language. All this combined with the incorporation of ICTs in the curriculum as part of it.

The teachers of other subjects were also active participants, so the project was a step forward to improving teachers’ coordination and communication.
As for the contents of the project, cultural, natural, maritime and historical-architectural heritage are the ones worked.

The activities carried out in the project were diverse from those that entailed students’ research using ICTs and working with e-twinning space to those which were in relation to school educational trips about the topics worked with the production of different tasks.
Students cooked and edited videos of traditional recipes, learnt about their traditional instruments and sang the song of the project.They enjoyed dancing traditional dances.They were able to use a few words in Basque- Greek to break the ice . They volunteered and designed murals and posters to disseminate the project at school. They were proud ambassadors of it as well as guides of their heritage during it and through the mobilities.
They did school trips to perform the activities successfully. All their historical and architectural heritage knowledge acquired enhanced our students’ identity consciousness.
We had one students’ mobility in person and another virtual one. They meant unforgetful bonding and personal experience for both of them, because what they learnt through the project was practiced in situ. They also strengthened life and social skills as well as reinforced their self – awareness as European citizens.
Moreover, there were another two teachers’ mobilities to follow a training in eTwinning, flipped classroom, disssemination and assessment.

The methodology used in the project was flipped classroom.That is, students were introduced to contents at home and practised working. Students developed their communicative skills while working together as a group, step by step in a framework, in which creativity and critical skills were developed. Due to this project, they gained autonomy, responsibility, awareness of group work, creative thinking, artistic and social abilities as they were in charge of planning, researching, organising, editing, presenting and elaborating their final product.

The results were: the web of the project, forums, Paddlets, PowerPoints and Thinglinks of presentations, videos, leaflets, diaries, the logo of the project, a multilingual dictionary, interviews, digital stories, recipes, the creation of twinning space, newsletters of the project, digital magazines, posters, murals, graffiti and kahoots as assessment.
We cannot forget that students improved their competence in English, motivation, cultural diversity, personal initiative and entrepreneurship spirit.

Thanks to the project, the teachers improved their professional competences and set the keystone for collaborative work. What’s more, the project promoted good inter-relationships with the families. It was disseminated in all the educational community and it appeared in the press, on the radio and television.

The longer term benefits of the project are a starting point to continue with its sustainability through collaborative projects related to it with the Greek school, as well as the incorporation of it in the English subject curricula. A way to continue developing attitudes and procedures related to respect and tolerance with another culture and the capacity of transmitting their own one in multilingual contexts.

Project Website

https://katexaldeerasmus.com/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 47659,6 Eur

Project Coordinator

IES ELEXALDE BHI & Country: ES

Project Partners

• 3O GYMNASIO KATERINHS