The last years we have been confronted with a new reality that is the massive arrival of refugees and immigrants through the Aegean sea to our countries seeking a better way of life for them and their children. Since turning focus on humanity is the first step towards solving the refugee crisis, it is vital for teachers to remember their role as educators in general, as reformers of characters, as promoters of values and human rights, as open minded people who have to inculcate in their pupils the respect for other cultures, a positive attitude towards people of other religions, countries and with different life style. Our objective is to create the proper conditions in class to help young minds expand and identities flourish. Moreover to enhance education for pupils and teachers through technology easily adjustable to every school age so that in a playful way we will train and motivate our students and teachers to acquire new skills and competences and strengthen their profiles of the teaching profession respectively. In that way we will set the basis from a very early age to the social integration of newcomers (immigrants, refugees) or minorities already living in our countries. We will acquaint students with the new reality by raising their emotional intelligence. Priority will be given to innovative teaching methods and pedagogies for addressing our target groups by providing use of participatory approaches and technology based methodologies as well as new approaches to address social, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity. The partner schools are deeply concerned with social problems and they have to deal with them in class. The teachers work hard on n school inclusion of students with special educational needs, cultural differences, early school leaving and lack of motivation due to economic problems. Each one of the partners of this project has worked on social skill teaching in his/her class since we all have a common attitude that it is fundamental for students to cultivate their social skills quality that will help them lead a balanced life far from extreme behaviours and attitudes towards others (bullying, terrorism, racism). Each one of the partners has access to ICT . The expected results will be both tangible i.e. digital teaching and learning material and intangible i.e. increased knowledge and experience gained, increased awareness on social matters, better foreign language skills and improved ICT skills. This program will be built on Active - Experiential Learning and the Cooperative learner-cantered teaching model oriented. Applying Pedagogical techniques such as: brainstorming activities, group discussion, visual / artistic expression and creation simulation, role-play, drama, narrative reconstruction and many more will be applied in classes aiming at raising the sense of belonging to the wider open to everybody community. Students will work in groups, use new technologies, and undertake research or projects, both in the curriculum and in the teaching concerning the extension-training offer. The activities will be designed bearing in mind the age students, the needs of each school and the conditions under which the partners will be asked to implement them. The impact envisaged for the students will be better knowledge of the European Union, development of tight bonds with the pupils from the partner schools, development of their digital skills, ability to work in teams, social skill development, motivation to use and improve foreign languages, improvement of students' self confidence, development of their creativity skills, improvement of emotional environment of education and upbringing and promotion of inter cultural and intergenerational education for lifelong learning. The desired impact for the Teachers will be to experience different teaching methods, supplement knowledge of other educational systems, improve their knowledge of the English language, create bonds with other teachers inside and outside their school, work in teams, learn and use new technologies. Finally, we will aim at the continuation of our professional development through KA1 actions and stay in touch through eTwinning projects in which we will involve other interested partners as well. Moreover, the produced material will be open to all educators who might be interested to work on a similar project and we will seek to update the material by adding new tasks and activities and accept suggestions for adaptation and feedback by anyone interested in using it in class.
This project was an attempt to achieve the early awareness of our primary school students towards the natural diversity in the world. Influenced by the refugee crisis, we thought it was vital for teachers to remember their role as educators in general, as reformers of characters, as promoters of values and human rights, as open minded people who have to inculcate in their pupils the respect for other cultures, a positive attitude towards people of other religions, countries and with different life style. Bearing these in mind we organized a series of activities with our partner schools from Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Turkey.The activities were designed bearing in mind the needs of the students, their age and the different circumstances they confront in their countries (economic crisis, lack of safety, unequal education opportunities, rural or urban areas). We accustomed the children to social and civil skills, holidays and festivities and raised their awareness on social inclusion and how this can be achieved through educators who tried hard to be the role models for their students. All partners were involved in decision making, they cooperated with their colleagues at school and involved parents, members of their community and other people outside schools they thought could help them implement and disseminate our project. With online meetings, eTwinning activities, card and letter exchange among our students, and teachers' and students' mobilities we managed to develop a sense of belonging to the European multicultural community. Both teachers and children had the opportunity to be creative, to develop their talents, to express themselves in a better way and to feel successful in the most natural and funny way. The development of teachers was achieved by sharing strategies, resources and good practices and presenting these via learning resources, thus increasing professional effectiveness, exposure to innovative teaching activities. We succeeded to improve and develop skills and competences like critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration across networks, agility and adaptability, effective oral and written communication, curiosity and imagination. By starting from the basic and trying to achieve creativity and innovation we exposed the students to different sources on human rights and material relevant to our topic (videos, interviews) and provoked them in order to mobilize their emotional intelligence. It was our intention from the very beginning to promote the use of ICT to acquire and enhance digital skills and we did it more than expected since the corona virus pandemic made this use even more imperative. We established a project in the eTwinning platform in which the pupils would be able to present their cities, villages, home places, to children from other countries. Our intention was to guide them through culture, history, architecture, art and literature and cultivate the European Citizen identity and the sense of empathy. Most importantly, we achieved to realize the innovative basis of our project, a Virtual Learning Moodle Platform using open source software, available to all school departments. In this platform we uploaded the material produced by teachers in all five schools who cooperated extremely well. More specifically we involved our students in reading a book called "The boy at the back of the class" referring to a refugee kid's life in order to create an awareness of the difficulties experienced by children of a similar age and class. The three mobilities were the flagship of our project. The acquaintance with people from different cultures, the use of the English language as a means of communication and the extraordinary activities (parades, workshops, visiting museums and archaeological sites, tasting local food) organized by the hosting schools exposed teachers, pupils and parents to so much info that no source can provide. Finally dissemination was achieved with announcements made in our school official websites, a Facebook account in which parents could follow our activities throughout the project, school events in which parents volunteered to help us, press article released, school newspapers and magazines, seminars organized by the school advisor for colleagues from other schools, videos, teacher-coordinator's personal blog in which 60 teachers visited the post including the link to the produced material, radio interview, and a website created (CLOM.eu) where someone can find almost everything we did with our students to implement the project and achieved throughout our cooperation. Finally, for the evaluation of the project we used observation and monitoring for systematic data collection as well as a number of questionnaires distributed to parents and colleagues in order to evaluate the whole effort and the produced material is available to anyone interested to use it .