In total six secondary schools would be involved into the project named "International ICT competitions for increasing the quality of secondary education". The main objective of the project is to increase the level of ICT skills and good command of office pack in English environment (for our students strange, unoriginal environment) which help increase their qualification and facilitate their labor market position, or can help for further education. The main coordinator will be Mendelova secondary (high) school from Nový Jičín (Czech Republic), which consists of three constituent parts (economical, ICT and healthcare) and has got extensive experience with organizing of Comenius and Leonardo projects. Parnerts: 1) Salesian Vocational Training School with four different specialties: Mechanics, Telecommunications, Commerce and Administration management in Alcoy (Spain). 2) Zespół Szkół Technicznych i Placówek im. St. Staszica is a state technical school in Nowy Targ (Poland). The school comprises four-year technical profiles (general construction, car mechanics, geodesy, IT studies and electric installation). 3) Lyceum of Meliki is situated in the northern part of Greece. This school is currently participating in a comenius program. That was the first experience for most of the teachers with European programs. 4) Agrupamento de Escolas Dr. Serafim Leite in S. João da Madeira. The school has a very diverse offer as far as courses are concerned. It is mainly in the areas of the Sciences of Life; Computer Science and ICT, Eletronics, Mecatronics, Visual Arts. 5) PRIVATNA JEZICNA GIMNAZIJA PITAGORA in Split (Crotia). PJG PITAGORA is a grammar school based in Split, Croatia. The curriculum of the school i focused on languages. Pitagor has 2 computer labs used for ICT practicums. Within the three-year project will be carried out six project meetings (each in a different country) and five of them will be combined with a short-term student stay. During the stay five international student competitions in ICT skills will take place. Competition tasks will be in English (for sudents it is not their mother tongue). The main aim of teacher meetengs is to prepare international competitions (creation of examples, creation of evaluation methods, organizing of school competitions, exchange of experience and prezentation of new teaching methods in ICT and foreign language teaching). All outputs (examples, ideas, experiences) will be processed in written form – a booklet, and also available to those interested through e-learning environment MOODLE. Competition results will be published on individual school websites. We expect administration of additiional project in the future. Again international competition extended by creation and editing graphic work, or arranging a competition with help of on-line tools.
The project "International ICT Competitions for Enhancing the Quality of Secondary Education" involved a total of six secondary schools. The main objective of the project was to increase the level of ICT skills and knowledge of office software in the English environment (for students not to be the mother tongue), which help increase their qualifications and facilitate their position in the labor market or in further training. The main coordinator was the Mendel High School in Nový Jičín (Czech Republic), which consists of three main parts (economic, ICT and health) and has extensive experience with the organization of Comenius and Leonardo projects and the organization of the Regional ICT Competition. Within the three-year project, six project meetings (each in another country) took place and five of them were combined with short-term student stays. During the stay, five international student competitions in ICT skills were organized. The competition tasks were given in English. The main goal of the teachers was to prepare international meetings including international competition (creating and editing examples, creating assessment methods), organizing school competitions, exchanging experiences and presenting new ICT teaching methods and teaching foreign languages. All outputs (examples, ideas, experiences) were processed in printed and electronic form - brochures and are also available to interested parties on the project website www.ictcompetition.eu. The brochure contains eight sets of examples in English and Czech (8 text editor examples, 8 spreadsheet examples and 8 examples of the presentation program), including source files. Each example contains 20 to 30 obodate tasks. Time allowance for processing example is 45 minutes. The project website also includes a description of the project, including information on participating schools (website of the school), e-mail contacts to project coordinators in each country, description of project activities of international meetings and use of ICT in education. All materials are available for free download and can be used by both teachers (for teaching, testing, CLIL, ECDL test students, self-study and the general public) (improving ICT skills - especially the OFFICE office suite and the English language. on partner's school websites. The main benefits of the project include increasing students' motivation to engage deeper into ICT in combination with English, enhancing international co-operation, seeking new ways of teaching, creating material (a sample booklet) suitable for teaching students and the general public, and comparing the level of knowledge and skills in schools (countries). 29 students obtained ECDLSTART certificate. In the future, we would like to launch a new project if the international competition were to be extended to the use of graphic elements, and the competition teams would form international groups to deal with ICT projects (mainly office software and graphics).