Schools from 5 different secondary/upper secondary schools in 5 different countries across Europe have joined in the project "Social Media as a tool for Inclusion" (SoMeIn). This strategic partnership for schools, created in the framework of the Erasmus + KA2 action, has been focusing its attention on a series of relevant issues affecting education institutions today and concerning both teachers and learners. We want to share our best practices in the fields of social media and inclusion from each of our schools to learn from each other and develop common teaching materials and an information campaign. The SoMeIn project is the result of a meeting between teachers from Greece, Estonia, Finland and Denmark in an Erasmus Contact Seminar on Inclusion in Warsaw in November 2017. We met and discussed different problems related to Inclusion, Social Media and European Citizenship. Although we are from schools across Europe, we share the same problem with exclusion in social media and feel that there is a lack of knowledge, awareness and teaching materials in this field. We had many interesting discussions in Poland and wanted to continue working together to solve our common problem through the exchange of best practices. In fact we discovered, that we shared the belief, that social media can also include people, for instance the previously excluded (living in remote areas, being disabled etc.). We agreed to try to develop a way to make social media a tool for inclusion in schools. The challenges we as teachers from different schools across Europe were discussing in Warsaw seem to be fully acknowledged by the European Ministers of Education in the Paris Decklaration of 2015 and by the statistics presented at the Gothenburg Summit in November 2017, and recent research on ICT-based inclusion seems to support our optimisism. The Danish school was chosen as the coordinating school due to their recent and good experiences with cooperating in a KA2 Erasmus project. The Spanish partner from that KA2 project joined the new project since it is highly relevant to their school developement strategy as well. So the project involves schools from North, South, East and West in Europe. In the SoMeIn project, the pupils will be active participants in the making of the materials to give them a sense of ownership to the material and include their experiences. Some teachers and pupils will contribute directly as representatives from their schools in the mobilities, but the major part will contribute through online and in-class activities. The parents will be involved too, as the information campaign will also address them. All the results and outputs will be made available as digital/ online resources and dissemination at local/regional/national and international levels will be carried out in events, seminars presentations and through different media. The transnational dimension of the partnership is essential to create outputs which are always valid, regardless of the local situation. And like it was stated in the Paris Declaration, we must stay united. Identifying best practices in social media and inclusive teaching and learning in the different education systems, and merging them together in the proposed action is expected to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in the partner Institutions. The partners will have improved relationships with local/national and international institutions and stakeholders in the field of Education and increased capacity and professionalism to work at EU level.
Schools from Finland, Estonia, Greece, Spain and Denmark have worked together in the project “Social Media as a tool for Inclusion” (SoMeIn) coordinated by Langelinieskolen, Denmark (Charlotte Rørbøl). This strategic partnership for schools, created in the framework of the Erasmus + KA201 programme focused its attention on a series of relevant issues affecting education institutions today and concerning both teachers and learners. We have shared our best practices in the fields of social media and inclusion from each of our schools to learn from each other and made a common information campaign. Although we are from schools across Europe we have shared the same problem with exclusion in social media and felt that there was a lack of knowledge, awareness and teaching materials in this field. It is a field that is undergoing a rapid development. GDPR was implemented just before the start of the project and technological opportunities are constantly changing. We share the belief that social media can also include people for instance the previously excluded living in remote areas, being disabled etc. The objective of the project was to develop a way to make social media a tool for inclusion in schools. We made the students participate actively in the making of the materials to give them a sense of ownership to the material and include their experiences. A limited number of teachers and students participated in the project by taking part in the mobilities, but a much larger number took part by participating in the online collaborative activities for instance in the eTwinning project. The TwinSpace of the eTwinning project functioned as a “model social media” where students and teachers could interact online in a secure environment. Dissemination has taken part throughout the project. We have a blog SoMeInErasmus.blogspot.com that have reached an audience beyond Europe but we have also appeared in newspaper articles and done dissemination in national conferences, school assemblies an by visiting to local authorities. And of course in social media like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. The results were collected in the blog SoMeInErasmus.blogspot.com. The project lead to Langelinieskolen applying for and being accepted as an eTwinning school. This is a longterm result as it means that it is now embedded in the school strategy to do online cooperation between students and teachers at a European level in the years to come.