The project 'EUth-App: The Alternative Guide for Young Travellers in Europe' originates in a former Secondary School multilateral association within LLP-Comenius Programme, and the current initiative brings together three partner schools from Spain, Latvia and Turkey. The former partnership was effective and productive in terms of an increase of the European identity in our institutions that led us to want and do more. The impact was especially strong on our pupils.The needs analysis carried out showed a strong focus on inclusive European citizenship and the internationalisation of our schools, improving teachers’ and students’ language skills and seeking to strengthen independent skills and integrated learning. The main aim of our project will be to promote inclusive and active EU citizenship across the curriculum for the staff and the students in partner schools, spreading internationalisation and cross-border cooperation, developing skills in the subjects of Music, Art & Design, Social and Natural Sciences, Technology, RE and PE. The tool for achieving this objective is an App which will be used by local tourists in all participating countries. This App will be the vehicle to attain our operational objectives: promote active EU citizenship across the curriculum, improve EFL skills, develop entrepreneurial initiatives among our students, enhance ICT capacities in both teachers and learners and finally boost the use of European recognition, validation and transparency tools.Students will work in transnational groups to decide on their main attractions in their area. Students will then work collaboratively via eTwinning to enhance each others' work. The App will be translated into all languages from the partner schools, and the languages studied in them. The project is innovative and engaging, and will greatly enhance the experience of all participants, allowing pupils and teachers to travel to each others' countries. This will give each member of the project the opportunity to experience, first hand, the key areas that are being focussed upon for the development of the App. Each country will offer an expertise which will feed into the final completion of the App, supported for use in Android, Apple and Google smartphones and devices. Schools will offer their skills in ICT, technology, science, languages and humanities departments. Students will be encouraged to use all subject areas to discuss the project and to feed these ideas into the main work. We expect to have more than 2,000 15-18 year-old pupils actively involved in the project and many more indirectly, about 10% of whom being students with lesser opportunities. The selection process will focus strongly on inclusion, so as to have all kinds of pupils involved from all ethnic, academic and social backgrounds, and not only the best academically.We will apply active methodologies like Project-based Learning, independent learning and flipped-classroom techniques, fostering the position of teachers as mentors and facilitators rather than leaders. The direct results of our project will be a better awareness of our students' cultural, historical and natural environment, a better knowledge of the technological skills required for creating the App, empowering our students as the centre of their learning, a greater strengthening of ties among the participant European countries, enriching contact with the English language, and promotion of tourist bonds. We envisage strong impact in schools as institutions, the local community and potential tourist visitors, and the final product can be easily exploited in the long term, both within the school and in the wider community. All partners are keen to support the work and it is anticipated that the impact of the work and its legacy will spread far beyond the lifetime of the project. The App will be innovative in that it will offer an insight from the pupils' perspective to allow other young people across Europe to have fun in discovering exciting new places that would be off the regular tourist maps. The project will be evaluated by teacher co-ordinators and students to ensure full participation. Evaluation will take place on a regular basis to allow a clear indication of the progress of the project. Long-term benefits will be that the students will have the excitement of being involved in creating the App, research, independent and group work. They will also gain a wider knowledge of all participating countries' cultures and experiences. The project will offer pupils a legacy of possible work placements in the future across Europe. Teachers in the project will develop their individual skills and become more enthusiastic about their work. The interactive nature of the project and its product will allow the students in year two to develop from the work produced in the first year. It can be anticipated that this will become a user-friendly and helpful addition to a young persons' travel kit.
EUthApp: The Inclusive Guide for Young Travellers in Europe, our KA219 cooperation and innovación project, has taken place among three schools in Liepāja, LT, y en Söke, TR. In the project time all the objectives have been fully reached, even getting some extended benefits beyond the planning at application time. We have succeeded in getting a sizable number of students and teachers involved in fostering European citizenship and internationalization in our school. We have also been able to develop language skills in our students and teachers, not only in the English language, but in other minor European languages, which got more visibility for our community, like Italian, Latvian, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese and others, including Esperanto, thanks to the transnational and multilingual dimension of our project. EUthApp has also fostered skills in our students connected to team work, both locally and in multinational teams, skills of personal autonomy, project work and integrated learning and CLIL. Special mention must be made of the ample synergies between EUthApp and IES Gabriel Alonso de Herrera's multilingual CLIL programmes, both benefitting from each other throughout the duration of the project. Those students in the vocational training programme FP Básica I have been amply involved with the App development and technical side, more intensely during the first year of the project, when more design and development hours were needed. This has meant getting involved in the project students under risk of exclusion from the educational system. And last, all these innovative techniques and methodologies have contributed to pique our students' interest in leadership and entrepeneurship, thus favouring their future employability. Activities in the project focussed on design, development and supply of contents for an open App (www.euthapp.eu) which indexes contents on a world map, with tourist-interest contents (from our students' eye) about their home towns and other places they have visited privately or within school trips. Thus we can find contents (what we call POIs or Points of Interest) about Talavera, Salamanca, Benavente, to name a few, but also international landmarks visited on occasion of school or family trips, like London, Munich, Viana do Castello, Rome, Milano, Bergamo, Oslo Frankfurt, Paris). Of course, our international colleagues have also produced contents related to their areas of residence or influence. Internationalization in our project has been achieved in this project by translating/localizing contents into at least the three languages of the project plus English as the pivoting language. This gives a full meaning to the three blended mobilities carried out within the project and the extra mobilities added as a bonus, the combined mobility of students C1, C2 and C3 in Talavera, Liepaja and Söke. The flexible stance and modularity of our project has allowed us to include more languages beyond the already mentioned four official languages in the project, 3 + 1. Our record lays in a total of eleven language in one single POI. From a quantitative point of view, we have more than met our objective of POIs to create. Where we planned to have 40/50 in the first year, we achieved 200 only in the Spanish school by August 2017. As of today, some 700 POIs have been implemented by the participating schools, while students are still working in the project today and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future, which means that our records will continue to be beaten in the future. We must highlight that we have got a new school involved from Frankfurt, DE, Adolf-Reichwein-Schule, brought in to our project from October 2018, thus widening the local and international impact of EUthApp.