CONTEXT The project was initiated to meet the needs of students to acquire and improve their know-how in terms of mobile application development, a skill that they will use after school years, regardless of the careers they have I can choose to follow them. We want students to break the barrier between passive mobile applications and the active use of mobile development tools. TARGET GROUP The project is aimed at students aged 15-18, approximately (400 students) who are mature enough to process this type and amount of information and to use them creatively to develop applications. Students come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and a significant percentage of them strive to overcome all kinds of obstacles - economic, cultural, financial, etc. Participants will be selected from this target group based on their digital skills, language skills, school results. Additional support will be provided to students who face any of the obstacles mentioned above. There will be 110 students participating in LTTA - 22 from each country in the 4 planned meetings with an additional 20-24 students from the host institution for which no grant is awarded but who will participate in the activities. The project also addresses IT teachers who will improve their material base and ensure the sustainability of project results. Teachers attending meetings are IT and English. Each meeting involves the participation of 8 teachers so that 32 teachers' mobility is involved. OBJECTIVES The aim of the project is to provide the necessary framework for teachers and students to collaborate, share ideas and good practice and learn how to develop mobile applications. By providing this framework, we intend to achieve a number of objectives as well as the intercultural dialogue objectives that the project entails: O1: At least 70% of students in the target group will be familiar with mobile application development requirements O2: At least 50% of students will actively contribute to the active creation of new mobile applications O3: At least 90% of students participating in transnational meetings will improve their digital skills O4: At least 80% of participants will improve knowledge of foreign cultures O5: At least 70% of participants will improve communication skills in English and other languages of partners O6: All participants will develop tolerance, inappropriate respect, and intercultural understanding O7: All project team members and students will improve organizational, teamwork and data manipulation skills. MAIN ACTIVITIES Portugal - organises C1 – Nov. 2018; creates and manages the project site Czechia - organises C2 – Feb. 2019; creates the project logo Macedonia - organises and C3 - May 2019; creates the Facebook page of the project and manages it. Bulgaria– organises C4 – Nov. 2019, coordinates broadcasting Turkey - organises C5 (April 2020); creates the eTwinning project account and manages it METHODOLOGY The project involves 5 main steps: initiating (identification of needs and partners), planning (action plan, methodology, resources), implementation (organization of activities before, during and after transnational events), evaluation (throughout the project and at the end of the project ), completion (reporting, elaboration of the impact study, sustainability plan).
Mobile apps, it is a term used to describe Internet applications that run on smartphones and other mobile devices. Mobile applications usually help users by connecting them to Internet services more commonly accessed on desktop or notebook computers, or help them by making it easier to use the Internet on their portable devices. We must recognize that the future will certainly be in the digital world. There is a pressing need to help students learn how to manage and use all kinds of mobile applications, whether we, like teachers born a few decades ago, would like or dislike this. Mobile Apps in Classes is international Erasmus+ project, which was attended by pupils and teachers from five countries from the Czech Republic, Turkey, Portugal, Bulgaria and Northern Macedonia. The aim of the project was to acquaint students with some mobile applications. We want students to break the barrier between passive mobile applications and the active use of mobile development tools. The first mobility started in November 2018 in Portugal only with teachers teams. Teachers reorganized the project and made every detail clear for effective cooperation. During their visit to Portugal, the teaching teams took part in seminars at which various mobile applications were introduced. The seminars took place in the form of lectures, but at the same time the teachers tried to work independently in these applications. After each seminar, the teams agreed on the suitability and complexity of the application. It was necessary to take into account the focus of the partner schools and the availability of appropriate software. The partner school in Turkey is a technical school where, in addition to other technical fields, they learn programming and have programming software at their disposal. There is a lot of mobile applications in the ICT world, so we decided to focused of five representatives of them. Every country chose one app. Turkey – Android studio, Portugal – MIT App Inventor, Bulgaria – Office 365, Czechia – Padlet, Macedonia – Socrative. All applications can run on mobile devices, and Padlet, Office 365 and Socrative can run directly on tablets and PCs and for Android Studio and MIT App Inventor applications, simulation programs are used to run on a PC. The next LTTA mobilities was in February 2019 in the Czech Republic. In May 2019 we visited the school in the North Macedonia. In November 2019 we visited our partner in Bulgaria. At each meeting, the student team had at least half a day to work with their mobile application. This means explaining and showing how to work with the application, then testing the application together and creating a task. Students mostly used their mobile phones for work, but tablets and desktops were always available. Interim results for quizzes, filling the notice board at the Padlet, or source codes for programs were projected on the screen. Teams of 5-6 students from each country, accompanied by teachers, took part in these mobilities. The students were aged 14-18. Samples from the results of using mobile applications were presented at the meetings. The last mobility was to take place in Turkey, but unfortunately it was postponed due to the covide epidemic. The project was extended by one year, but even at this time the situation did not improve and therefore the last activity was carried out online in June 2021. The activity took place every day using the Zoom application. We divided the mobility between the individual countries so that each partner was in charge of one day. Several Facebook groups have been created. One was for teachers only and the other for everyone. Photographs from mobilities were stored here and informal communications also took place here. There were some concernes about the publication of photos of participants (https://www.facebook.com/groups/419455156255427, https://www.facebook.com/groups/365926487533020, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1854992697930523) For entering some of the FB groups, it is necessary to become a group member. The project has its own website (https://mobileappsclasses.home.blog/) and the main result is a manual of mobile applications, where each partner has created a chapter on the assigned application. The manual therefore has basic chapters devoted to these applications and offers readers all the information, including illustrative examples. The manual is also accessible in electronic form using one of the selected mobile application Padlet. For each mobility, we created a blank bulletin board in various designs and thanks to student contributions, students could learn about others, which improved their mutual communication. During the project, we also got the idea that we could use this bulletin board to display everything about the project, so we created a bulletin board of the project, to which new information was added after each mobility.