BACKGROUND The project is interdisciplinary and multileveled as it refers to all the subjects (the choice of the subject depends on the target group of students, teachers involved in it and their expertise and the type of the school). Theoretical part is limited only to getting to know the Tools to be used whereas the practical part plays the most vital element of the whole idea. The main task is not to learn from textbooks but only empirically through experience during multinational lessons and from lessons based on the abilities gained throughout the whole process. Each partner meeting will be divided into a few stages: experimenting with the tools, gathering data, their analysis with the use of Web 2.0 tools and presentation of these results in a number of forms including artistic expression. All the activities are complementary to schools' curricula. Students from partners countries will have a chance to experience the world from another perspective (being a part of an exchange program and sharing the life of their partners), break stereotypes and become more tolerant and open to differences. SOCIAL CONTEXT In partner schools there are students with special needs and students that risk social exclusion. Some students’ families have not got florid finances, so this project will give them the possibility to improve their English, increase their interests and motivation, develop international understanding and cooperation and enlarging their cultural horizons. This project can also give our students the opportunity to compare their culture, customs and knowledge with peers living in other countries of Europe. OBJECTIVES: - Promote positive attitude towards school and education, - Encourage understanding about self-improvement especially within the process of self-education, - Raise awareness of critical age phenomenon, - Develop innovative strategies and methods in problem solving, - Encourage students to talk about their feelings and emotions, - Enable students to discover strategies of effective time management, - Provide students with a possibility to present their findings to European audience, - Study the educational practices of different countries, - Exchange best practices with the use of legal materials, - Develop students' and teachers' ICT skills, -Improve students' and teachers' competence of English, -Disseminate the results to the partners' local and national communities and to the Erasmus + community, - Versify the methods used during the lessons, - Creating a database with innovative ELT materials and interactive tools to be possible to download to everyone interested - Motivate students to strive for a higher level of education. NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS: There are 5 partner schools and we plan 4 short-term exchanges, each for 16 coming students and 16 hosts, each school will provide 2 responsible teachers to accompany them. Students will be matched according to a set of criteria, one of them being the similar age group. The coordinators from all partner schools have experience in either taking part of European projects or applying or simply working with partners on international level. Indirectly entire schools will benefit from the project as well as local communities involved in activities at meetings and during promotional activities disseminating our results. Sharing the knowledge and experience will be boosted and diversified due to the combination of general schools and vocational ones, where students can learn from each other by mixing academic and practical subjects.
“Tools for thought. May the Web with you” was a European two-year project (2017-2019) with Poland, Cyprus, England, Italy and Portugal as partners.The theoretical part of the project was based on the acquisition of knowledge about technological Tools in the teaching field, while the practical one regarding experimentation and discussion, was the core of the entire work. We believed that modern technologies not only make lessons more attractive but thanks to their varied forms of reference they enhance the effectiveness of acquiring the material to be learned. They accelerate the knowledge process by adjusting the messages conveyed to the students enhancing their level of perception. Nowadays, personalized lessons and techniques are used as essential tools in rendering the learning experience more interesting and useful. Our project made it possible to reach all types of learners - those who prefer to study from a given text, from messages on the screen, to talking and listening to someone. The course-book was necessary to put the material in order but extra activities done along with the process of acquisition made it more understandable, memorable and effective. The tools offered on the web not only allowed for revising, testing students' abilities but also made it possible for the teachers to easily and almost instantly get feedback about the effectiveness. It was crucial that schools offered students the possibility of being the active beneficiaries of these methods and not the simple passive users. And this has been the first important achievement of this project. Selecting the method might be beneficial in all the stages of learning, at school to acquire and at home to revise; most of all, in one's free time, during on-line meetings with peers from partner countries.The school of tomorrow should take into account the fact that old-fashioned learning might be beneficial for only a limited group of students.The work has involved all kinds of subjects (interdisciplinary). The choices made by teachers and students involved, freely for each partner country were based on the different subjects of teaching of participant teachers, the different kinds of school syllabuses and the different ages of the students. All these are our project's concrete results and achievements. For what concerns the original objectives, we met mainly these: promoting positive attitude towards school and education developing innovative strategies and educational methods in problem solving activities enabling students to discover strategies of effective time management enhancing teachers and students' digital competencies improving pedagogical approach by providing high quality educational material integrating ICT in teaching processes, developing practical skills in students while teaching raising awareness their national languages, history, geography and culture promoting collaborative teaching, developing social and self-presentation skills, exchanging best practices. If we want to keep up with the pace of life of our students we must try to at least speak their language, in this case the language of modern technologies. Working within international groups meant creating real-life situations in which using a foreign language is indispensable and unavoidable and most of all, which was noticed by the students and their parents, it brought tremendous changes in the learners from all the partner schools. New technologies have one more undeniable aspect: they make students ready for self-realization and life-long learning which is very important in our society with its overwhelming progress that seems to require being omniscient. By using them we influenced students' autonomy which has been underlined as the key factor not only in education but also in real-life existence.This helped the direct participants, but also throughout the school and the local community involved in the dissemination who acquired a positive attitude towards the educational system. Thanks to this self-training process, developing problem-solving strategies in a peer-to-peer laboratory work, with the possibility of presenting their findings to a large community like the European one, good practices were exchanged both between students and teachers. And this is the evident achievement exceeding the initial expectations: all our students work was praiseworthy. Transnational Meeting – Two meetings took place in Bydgoszcz, Poland. During the first one, which initiated the project, we agreed upon the cooperation, we planned all the activities and designated people responsible for management and dissemination results, we established common framework of work and chose the tools to use them. The last transnational meeting was to make sure we can provide reliable results and write common reports presenting our findings and feedback.