This Strategic Partnerships for vocational tourism education and training is a partnership between 3 European education partners (colleges) with the aim to create new tools for city guiding courses. During a period of 30 months staff and students from 3 VET schools will develop this new teaching tools. The preparation will be done using digital platforms as e-Twinning and virtual meetings. Once a year a group of students from each school will do a try-out of the created tool "on the spot" during a short learning mobility. The created outcomes will be checked by "expert" partners. These "expert" partners of the professional field of tourism & guiding will support and look over the outcomes. During the project VET students will learn about cultural environment, architecture, religions, local and international history and they will use their own level of language, creating their own tools. The project partners are Riga Technical School of Tourism and Creative Industry, Provinciaal Instituut PIVA from Antwerp, Helsinki Vocational College. For this project they have agreed to focus on VET students between 15 till 17 years to work in this project (for all of these students English is a second language). Two groups of 10 students will go on learning activity, they will work with a partnerschool from the project for four days. To come to useful tools for the vocational education system also meetings for staff ( teachers) are provided in the project. This project will bring 2 major benefits: Participating in the learning flows the VET students and their teachers will increase their skills and creativity in teaching. The outcomes will be published digitally from November 2017 in 6 different languages for VET tourism education centers, VET trainers, their partners and stakeholders. All participants of the flows will receive a Europass Mobility from the project as an international certificate.
The project partners - Riga Technical School of Tourism and Creative Industry (Latvia), Provinciaal Instituut PIVA, Antwerp, Belgium and Helsinki Vocational College (Finland) has known each other for many years from the C.H.A.S.E (Consortium of Hospitality and Accommodation Schools of Europe) network. These partners worked together in EU mobility projects as a receiving & sending partner for Restaurant - Kitchen - Bakery - Hospitality in vocational education. On the annual meeting of this network in November 2013 first planning started to work together in the field of tourism education. It was nice to have 3 big cultural cities in the project with other background, other religions, other basic language & different education system. For this project partners agreed to focus on VET students between 15 till 17 years (for all of these students English is a second language). The aim of this project was to provide learners & trainers of VET in tourism field the ability to create new, ICT based methods of learning on their own level. The transnational co-working in this project was a value: participants integrated the languages, art, culture, religion, architecture, history. Tourism teachers and students from 3 VET schools worked together - first, VET students learned about cultural environment, architecture, religions, local and international history of other country and by using local language, then worked together with participants from other schools via Facebook group, e-mail google drive by making theoretical base for tourism routs in the city. Within learning/teaching/training activities students and teachers from different countries together developed new teaching tools in tourism - digital and developed from knowledge and ICT skills if participants. Once a year a group of students from each school did a try-out of the created tool "on the spot" during a short learning mobility. During this project, 6 new digital city guiding routes were created using GoogleMaps platforms, all the routs are created in 6 EU languages - English, Latvian, French, Dutch, Finish and Swedish. Digitization in both - education and tourism is becoming a topicality. Students learning in VET in tourism fields are a bit left behind therefore this project was a huge step in bringing use of digital tools in tourism education. Impact was greater than expected - we faced challenges in lack of ICT skills of teachers as well as lack of meaningful use of technologies among the students. This project was eye opener on current situation and the routed developed by project participants will be used as sample teaching material.