SUMMARY
The Project “HOME” which stands for “Historic Origins in Modern Era” has got as its crucial goal to create an International network amongst students, teachers and participating schools to spark changes towards a more modern and internationalized school education improving school staffs’ skills and reinforce the quality of teaching and learning.
The basic idea of this strategic partnership starts from the real need to protect and appreciate our cultural heritage through the responsibility and awareness in the use of modern technologies and devices. At the moment, our students are completely absorbed by their devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptop without valuing our beautiful and historic surroundings which represent our cultural identity, obviously different from country to country but part of a unique and special community: EUROPE. Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Italy, the five European countries/teams involved in this Erasmus+ project, intend to modernize the teaching methods in their own schools as well as improve teachers and students linguistic and digital literacy, making use of more innovative and modern methodologies and approaches in the process of learning/teaching in which each student is the main and active character to re-discover his/her origins and cultural identity and promote European Cultural Heritage.
Teachers and students could share their outcomes on cultural heritage about the countries involved in the project and exchange good practices developing them firstly at local level and after at European one. Students through the use of ICT and the different tools that will be used for communication will improve their competence in foreign languages and will build their social cooperation as both European citizens and above all citizens of the world. Citizenship becomes, therefore with Erasmus+ a real and powerful experience. Erasmus+ project HOME would like our students to become more inquisitive and open-minded and teachers to participate and improve their skills and modernize their teaching methods.
The main project objectives
In accordance with the update European key competences for lifelong learning of 22nd May 2018-Recommendation of the Council of the European Union, the main projest objectives are:
- modernizing education by finding methods for peer learning for teachers as well as students to share
- good practice by using ICT in learning languages.
- improving attainment in basic skills for young people such as language skills and ICT-skills and social responsibility.
- improving students’ knowledge about European cultural heritage
- improving school staff competences in languages and ICT as well as teaching methodology.
- applying methods to implement cross disciplinary work (CLIL, PBL, Non-formal Learning)
The different objectives will be achieved during the development of the activities at local level and reinforced during the Learning Teaching Training Activities and International Staff Meetings. The project’s outcome will be an itinerary about our local identity and cultural heritage through new technologies and devices with the creation of a city electronic guide (e-book for the exchange of good practices) which will include the methodologies used for teachers for innovative learning of languages. Communication will be through ICT-tools such as Skype, Google drive, WhatsApp.
Outcomes of the activities will be shared by the website of the project, eTwinning, schoolwebpages, Facebook page which will ensure the sustainability of results obtained through the project.
Teacher seminars will be organized to further train teachers in new methodology (CLIL, PBL) as well as ICT-skills. To deepen the cooperation-experience there will be 8 mobilities where the international project teams will meet and learn new skills and present their results. We are planning 8 meetings, 3 for teachers only, 5 for both students and teachers. We are planning a specific topic for each time period. Each international meeting will be a culmination of 3-4 months work of our schools. Our outcomes will be shared and we will learn about each country cultural heritage in an innovative way.
Thanks to this project we intend to develop in students’ insight skills and attitudes and to improve their interpersonal relationships. Students will meet friends from different European context and will compare their learning styles. Fostering the development of competences is one of the aims of a European vision that would be able ‘to harness the full potential of education and culture as drivers for jobs, social fairness, active citizenship as well as means to experience European identity in all its diversity’ as mentioned by the European Commission.
The impact expected is about the improvement of the quality in terms of education, training and learning both for students, teachers and more in general for the whole school community.
