"Track it Don't Lose It' is our project which will last 2 years and the background of it stems from the needs and challenges that face our underpriviledged students and youth in general under the current economic climate that requires today’s youth to be in line with the challenging demands of the 21st century. In our vocational schools especially, many students are from deprived backgrounds and many are issued from immigration and they do not have full access to the same opportunities as the students that attend schools in the general secondary education sector. Our students lack entrepreneurial, IT, social skills, and confidence in themselves that prevent them upon leaving school to be able to achieve or succeed in our ever changing world. Our aim is to help impact on their lives and give them a chance to improve the redimensionnement skills. The participants of this project are three schools from 3 different European countries, namely Cyprus, France, and Portugal. The coordinating country is France. All participating schools are vocational schools and have a common student profile in so far as the students come from different social, ethnic, economic and deprived backgrounds. The three schools are convinced of the benefit of European projects on their students. There will three transnational project meetings which will involve only teachers and will be held at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of the project. These meetings will be for the organisation of the project, the one in the middle for the follow up and the evaluation half way of the project and the last one for the final dissemination and evaluation of the results of the project. In between the transnational meetings, three learning/teaching/training activities will be held, one each in France, Portugal and Cyprus. In these activities, students will meet to present their schools and countries, to discuss, share, program, coordinate and cooperate with each other in order to produce an IT asset management program and then to form mini-companies. They will then be required to run them and produce ideas and or products and use the IT program that was previously produced under this project to facilitate the management of their companies. Accompanying staff will help and facilitate the students in achieving the best possible results of each learning/teaching/training activity. We envisage to work on the eTwinning Twinspace and to involve a much larger number of students who will work with other students within their own schools to establish the best company ideas. A number of staff will help and facilitate the students in achieving the best possible results on a local level. The main objectives in this project are: 1. Providing guidance and help to the participating students by teachers to produce a purpose built IT program for asset management, maintenance and the selling of products. This will greatly help them to improve their IT capabilities. 2. Establishment of student companies by groups of students under the supervision of participating staff. The student companies will have the added help of using the IT program developed in stage one of the projects to increase accountability and to maximise effectiveness to increase the profits of their mini-companies. This will be of benefit in helping students improve youth entrepreneurship and many other skills needed to be confronted into their future work life. The fact that 9 mini-companies will be formed in collaborative team within our participating schools, it will give an added incentive to the participating students to organise the best possible company ideas so they will be the winners of the companies contest and get awarded at the end of the project. 3. Give motivation to feel European citizens. By participating all together it'll enhance our innovation in education and allow our students to create a device which serves the needs of schools and also to give them keys to develop entrepreneurship. The creating of such device will allow our students to use their professional skills in order to realize a concrete objective and the different tasks will be integrated naturally into our curricula. The work in international teams will give confidence to them. By doing so, it'll strengthen our students social skills as well as their civic and intercultural competences. Additionally we hope to combat early school leaving and failure in Education in giving our students keys and the envy to continue their studies to get highest diploma that they can get. Staff will also greatly benefit from this project since they will be actively involved in all stages of the project. The results of the project will be available for everyone to use and the developed IT program will be available for everyone to download and use in its final form or modify to suit his individual needs. The whole project will be visible on the eTwinning Twinspace and on our website project.
Our three vocational schools from Cyprus, France and Portugal worked collaboratively for two years on the project called “Track it don’t lose it”. We decided to work together because our schools experienced the same difficulties such as many of our students came from deprived backgrounds, many were issued form the immigration, many of them were on the brim of dropping out school and they did not have full access to the same opportunities as the students that attended schools in general secondary education sector. We agreed that our students from different social, ethnic, economic and disadvantaged social categories needed to get the best and the most innovative way of teaching and we were convinced of the benefits of the European projects on our participants. We had three main objectives in our project: 1. Providing guidance and help to the participating students by teachers to write an IT program for asset management of products in our schools. This greatly helped them to improve their ICT skills. 2. Establishment of students companies by group of four international students under the supervision of participating staff. This helped the students to improve their entrepreneurship and many other skills which they would be needed in their future work life. 3. Giving motivation to feel European citizens. Our three schools were very complimentary because each one brought its expertise needed for the project. France was the coordinator and was responsible for the good communication throughout the project. The coordinator, as an eTwinning ambassador, was also responsible for the creation and organization of the Twinspace on eTwinning plateform. They also helped with the creation of mini companies. Portugal brought its long experience in doing many European programs and had a strong cooperation with Mozambic which enabled us to disseminate and offer our IT program to their partners. Portugal had an important role into the success of the creation of the mini companies by our students because they monitored this task. They were also responsible for our project advertisements, our dissemination plan and our website. Cyprus had a strong expertise in programming and with their partnership with the faculty of Limassol they taught our students how to program and to write an IT program. They also supervised the creation of the manual user for our IT program. The three transnational meetings one in each country (France, Portugal and Cyprus) spread at keen moments of the life of project took place at the beginning, in the middle and at the end were very important for teachers and headmasters to organize, manage, implement and adjust the different tasks of the project. In between three Learning Teaching and Training activities were held in Cyprus, then in France and finally in Portugal. They were highly appreciated by the students who met and share to work in collaboration in the writing and the testing of our IT program, on updating the website, creating the mini companies and presenting them. Our project’s different steps and results are visible on the Twinspace and any school which is interested in our IT program can use it for its own purpose. Our Twinspace allowed our students to in between and during the LTT. They worked on the summary of our LTTs and produced newsletters, leaflets, videos, user manual for our IT program, created a multilinguism dictionary brainstormed on entrepreneurship and they exchanged and discussed into forums. They also evaluated their work and the project. The staff was always helping and facilitating the students in achieving the best possible results. The impacts on our participants were numerous by participating and working in collaboration it enhanced our innovation in education and it allowed our students to create and IT program which is going to serve the needs of our schools and also it gave them the keys to develop entrepreneurship. They used their professional’s skills in order to realize a concrete work and the different steps for this It program was integrated naturally into our curricula. Our students’ social skills were strengthened because they had to work with persons from other countries, to communicate they had to speak English which was our common language though they learnt some phrases and words from our partners. They discovered the countries and the culture of our partnership. Working in international teams gave them confidence. We managed to combat early school leaving because none of our students left school. They passed all their exams and they continue to do studies and apply to do longer mobilities abroad in doing work placements. All the skills acquire during this project was very profitable for their future life as responsible citizens.