21st Century Teaching - Acquiring Skills and Expertise Using Mobile Devices and the Future Classroom A short description of the project: The motivation for our project has originated from the fact that our students are more heterogenerous than ever before. Apart from different age groups and differing levels of skills and knowledge, today`s schools are facing an increasing variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds among their students. As a consequence it is becoming more and more challenging to offer adequate lessons considering the differences in the students' language competence and at the same time enabling them to improve their skills and knowledge. In addition, we aim to achieve a high level of individualisation which will allow us to be responsive to the particular needs of each single student and therefore to give him/her the best support corresponding to his/her skills, competences and his/her specific type of learner. A further point motivating us to launch this project is that young people leaving school have to measure up to much higher expectactions than before when they enter the world of work. Digital literacy and a high level of self-reliance and flexibility are indispensable requirements on the modern job market. This is why we need new concepts with an innovative methodology for our teaching. An interdisciplinary competence focussed and project-oriented teaching and learning environment will enable teachers and students to rise to these particular challenges. In order to achieve this we want to explore and develop the possibilities of using new media and ICT tools in teaching. We will implement a Future Classroom in our respective instituitions and create innovative learning situations and teaching material using multimedia and ICT tools. We will also develop a practical guideline for the work with the Future Classroom and the creation of suitable teaching and learning situations. The conception and documentation of these sample teaching units as well as the guideline facilitate the development of further material for the use in the Future Classroom. It will be available for all teachers who want to include ICT and project-oriented material in their lessons. Students will experience a thrust of motivation by working with new and interesting material in a learning environment which allows them to explore their abilities. The variety of learning situations offered by a project-oriented teaching approch will lead to an increase of both technical/professional and social skills as capacity for teamwork, language skills, self-reliance and discernment will increase. The new approach to teaching and learning will also benefit those students who suffer from the lack of differentiation in the conventional classroom. The Future Classroom offers the possibility to provide for the particular needs of every single student. Six schools from different countries – all of them facing similar challenges and highly motivated to take a big step forward into 21st century teaching - will participate in this project. Students and teachers involved in the project will reflect the diversity of our schools. We want to involve students of different age groups and aptitude as well as teachers of different fields of study as we aim to reach all members of our institutions and make them benefit from the possibilities offered by an innovative approach to teaching and learning. During the project there will be one transnational meeting with teachers and students at each of the participating schools where we will work on the different tasks of the project, e.g. we will explore the use of multimedia tools in the classroom, plan and develop the Future Classroom, create competence focussed learning situations and evaluate their practical use. Furthermore, there will be two meetings for teachers only at the beginning and at the end of the project – the first one in order to plan how to proceed and decide about evaluation etc. and a last one to evaluate the results, take care of their dissemination and further development, and also to plan further collaboration and mutual support. In the long term the involved schools will benefit from this project by using and expanding the use of the Future Classroom implemented during the project; there is a possibility that the project partners but also other schools - as we plan to make all the results of this project available to interested parties - decide to transform more of their facilities in such modern teaching and learning environments. The Future Classroom, the guideline and the sample learning situations will be long-term and valuable resources as they can always be adapted, enhanced and expanded.
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