Our innovative project addresses our needs as teachers to lifelong learning and to our commitment to adopt innovative tools that: 1. promote and develop our students' progress and performance in our schools plus empower their self confidence and thus face the disappointment one feels when marginalized in academic topics. A fact that sooner or later leads towards the early school leave of these student groups 2. make teaching and learning an attractive process for all students 3. de-marginalize certain student groups with poor performance in academic topics 4. develop and enhance our professional skills as teachers, our teaching methods and our ways of motivating and engaging our students as well as our need to: 5. take advantage of Open Educational Resources that can be accessed for free in the web and this way, we are offering our final project products as a free OER, with no copyright limitations, free to be used by a vast majority of our European colleagues / project target group members 6. take advantage, exploit and transfer to everyday school practice, the knowledge and the know how of our external partners / experts in the field of education (formal and non formal education) plus establish strong bonds with them for potential future innovative projects 7. open our schools to a broader community of colleagues, parents, external partners and create a future network of potential partners focused and committed to educational innovation and practice 8. take advantage and integrate into this project the use of various innovative IT tools and software complementing the Mind Mapping and Multiple Intelligence tools 9. take advantage of the new possibilities provided by EU to disseminate our project and show our work to colleagues, parents, students, media, external partners in the field of education 10. take advantage of the student exchange mobility action and thus have 128 primary education students from 8 different countries move abroad to learn and work together into the same room (16 foreigner plus man more local students every time) on innovative joint project activities such as Mind Mapping, Multiple Intelligence, PBL and their relevant IT tools 11. take advantage of the new institution of Short Term Staff Training Events and thus move and educate in 3 such meetings 135 (3X45) colleagues abroad who will work on Mind Mapping and Multiple Intelligence tools plus on the PBL method along with even more local colleagues from hosting schools 12. take advantage of 6 Project Transnational Meetings and thus besides cooperation, evaluation, communication and further planning of the project another 108 colleagues (2 teachers x 6 meetings x 9 schools =108) will be educated mainly in our project e-tools and secondly in Mind Mapping and Multiple Intelligence techniques plus in the PBL method (plus local staff) 13. Teaching staff will gain Certificates on the new tools acquired plus they will add their updated Europass Passports to their LinkedIn / eTwinning accounts 14. Parents will be actively involved as they will be part of this Project and will move abroad to meet peers and start creating networks and connections for future adults projects as well as realize the way teachers are innovating and try to help their children. 94 of them will travel abroad, accompany students, will taste Europe and will transmit their positive experience to parents' associations We will begin by mastering Mind Mapping and we will later integrate it into the Multiple Intelligence tool. During the first year we will learn to take advantage of the Mind Mapping abilities and we will gradually blend it with the PBL method. We will also introduce the theory of Multiple Intelligence to our staff members. The second year we blend MM with MI and during the third year we develop MI activities. There are going to be many Short Term Learning Activities for both teachers and students, frequent evaluation, OER exploitation, external partners cooperation and multiple channeled dissemination of the project. The motto of our project, which we all strongly believe as expressed by mrs Eleni Garyfalaki, our MI mentor's words: "We want the student to feel safe, included, accepted and loved by the others and then we will open a window towards the world and we will give him/her "wings" to "fly away”” plus mrs Krista Kiuru, minister of Finnish Education words: "We can't afford to waste a brain" and more: "Regardless of a person's gender, background, or social welfare status, everyone should have an equal chance to make the most of their skills". We do believe that Europe too and the teaching communities across it, need also to take advantage of every brain available in all our 27 countries starting with the current Erasmus+ Programme 2014/20.
We can say that we, more or less, realised the majority of those plans described in our application through a mutual compromise, deep respect and exemplary cooperation among our 6 European partner schools. We can also honestly admit that this was a very optimistic project plan which we thought we should realise with no particular problems. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a mostly challenging project, especially the 2nd part of it - Multiple Intelligence (M.I.) - as well as the implementation of the Project Based Learning (P.B.L.) method in all project activities, so we had to replan them in order to keep the project attractive and simple. We had initially planned 4 complex activities for project year 3 that they were supposed to be realised in a 9 months time but the topic was too complex and we had to use all 8 different intelligences. So, we realised in their place simpler activities such as : “Teaching addition to younger ages” and “Teaching Language to older ones”, or “Our Solar System”. These M.I. activities needed a lot of preparation by many colleagues at school at the same time and we had to plan them with no special guidance like the ones in Mind Mapping (M.M.). During the 2nd part we tried to invite experts on M.I. from different partner countries with not such a great success. We believed that we could find an expert on guiding us to realise M.I. activities at school, but we didn’t, as most of them teach a theoretical only basis of M.I. and not concrete everyday practical activities that our schools need. At the same time implementing P.B.L. in all project activities turned out to be another challenge as for example Mind Mapping is mainly an individual procedure. P.B.L. was better to be used in the 2nd part of the project and we had the chance to learn more on this method by our mentor Aglaia lab. MM was accepted with great joy by both students and parents and is adopted and used nowadays in all partner schools as a very important tool. It worked well with all student groups plus with students with lower academics skills. MI is a way of teaching and learning that we are going to use more and more the following years as we now have understood and acquired the “know how” of it and the culture of cooperation among colleagues in partner schools has been raised significantly during the last project year. It worked very well with students with lower academics skills, immigrants and refugees in some schools which was our main goal. We all think that our students’ self confidence has been raised by using M.M. and M.I. because even though they might be not as good in academics, now they can participate in our schools daily teaching and learning process equally, contributing with their own special skills, be it artistic, athletic, etc. This can only be good for their future inside our schools and later in society. Most partner teachers and some parents have also adopted the MM tool for their work and the preparation of their classes. During the 1st part of the project everything was realised as scheduled because we were lucky to have excellent guidance by our M.M. expert, the Paramikro lab in Greece. Another challenge we encountered was the lack of dedicated funding by the EU for our parents’ mobilities that we initially and by mistake thought it was funded by E.U. (Accompanying Persons budget). As it was not, 3 partner schools (Swedish, Spanish and French) left the group and the project and we, the rest partners had to re-share their responsibilities, reschedule the mobilities and transfer money from our schools’ budget to new activities. That meant that teachers in certain partner schools had to work more than it was planned and the coordinating school had to transfer almost 2/3 of its Project Management budget to the 2 activities that had originally been planned to be realised by the Spanish school. Teaching became a more enjoyable procedure for the teaching staff and learning using MM and MI became more attractive for our students as it was initially described in the application. We know this both from our everyday contact with our students and from surveys in Google forms we created in order to evaluate this impact. We opened our schools to the broader family of our local communities’ members, parents, external partners and we created a future network of potential partners with plans for innovative future/follow up projects. All partner schools adopted the idea of the coordinating school to create in their schools a European Development Plan for their schools that is needed when applying for a KA1 or a KA2 Project. Parents were actively involved in the project and they were a crucial part of it. One of the most successful side effects of this project was to meet new cultures and to be guided and hosted by locals abroad. Less than the scheduled 94 of parents traveled abroad, tasted Europe and transmitted their positive experience to parents' associations due to the funding problem we mentioned.