‘Don’t dream your future - make it happen’ was a 2 year project involving 6 European countries as well as several external partners. 250 students and 70 teachers directly participated in the project but we intended to have an impact on more than 2500 students and around 200 teachers. Our objectives were to : - Give our students tools to handle challenges. - Strengthen their competences. - Help them increase understanding, gain knowledge, personal development and involvement through direct experience and be an active part of their own future and be aware of their own potential. - Tackle early school leaving. - Help our students become active European young citizens. - Refine the use of innovation in education, - Inspire and support teachers to act more innovatively - Give each other ideas on how to be innovative in a European dimension. - Trigger each school´s staff to contribute with necessary changes in the education system. - Support coherence and cooperation between school, colleges and companies. Each partner identified and explained their needs and strengths. This facilitated the distribution of tasks and responsibilities along the process. We believed that we could all gain and contribute to a successful outcome. Each partner also ensured that the nessessary time and resources ar available both before, during the project and for the sustainability of project results. We were also fully aware of the time and effort it would take making a project like this, and we had already had meetings and tuned the expectations. As 4 of the partners are experienced in Erasmus project and 2 in other international activities, we knew how to "make it happen". - Each school will select students considered suitable, depending on their own needs. -The selection process was open, transparent and fair, to ensure equal opportunity to all our students. To reach our objectives we put in place different activities: Short term activities: We worked on different aspects of teaching/learning innovation : ‘Making Right Choices for the Future’ ‘Brainstorming the next Business’ ‘My potential, My contribution’ ‘Creating a safe and stimulating environment at school’ ‘Think local, Act Global’ ‘The Full Package’ During and between short term activities, we cooperated with several external partners to strengthen the bounds between schools and actors on the job market as well as giving our students the opportunity to see how creativity and innovation can be implemented in our social and working environment Long term mobilities: A more in depth experience of daily life in another country A mixture of participating at school lessons and doing remote homework. Document/reflect on his/her experience during the stay Write a report Test in the subjects that the student has participated in Take part in the activities that the host family do Excursions and cultural experience during the stay with school/host family Participating countries ; Denmark, Spain, Italy Transnational meeting: It was our aim to foster a close relationship with our partners for a better development of our project. These meetings provided the opportunity to continuously improve and adjust our goals to make the project as relevant as possible to our students. We used DesignThinking, a solution-based approach to tackle possible problems that arose in the course of the project. We had procedures set for the students to apply for the outgoing and receiving mobilities. Close contact with parents and the school community ensured transparent and adequate communication. Students were actively involved in the preparation and development of the activities. To anticipate possible problems, risk analysis took place before each mobility. All partners agreed on majority decisions and provided necessary documents and insurances to reduce unforeseen actions. The project was highly connected with the idea of being part of a global world, in which opportunities are often found beyond our own country’s borders. The impact of the collaborative activities was multidisciplinary: gain confidence, knowledge, respect, skills and entrepreneurship, innovation, skills, European knowledge, motivation, cooperation, improvement in teaching/learning, bonds with the community and local stakeholders, better school atmosphere, etc). We ensured a wide impact by using a vast range of dissemination channels: Teachers Councils, Seminars, etwinning, social media, local /national newspapers etc). Each participant school was responsible for the preparation and dissemination activities and it was ensured that it involved different staff members but cooperation between the countries took place during the whole process to secure the best implementation. We would by this project strengthen the continuity and long term benefits. Teachers and students would be the best ambassadors in their own communities.
Our main objective was to strengthen the students´ competences, give them tools to handle challenges. Help them increase understanding, gain knowledge, personal development and involvement through direct experiences and be an active part of their own future and be aware of their own potential. Tackle early school leaving. - Help our students become active European young citizens. - Refine the use of innovation in education, - Inspire and support teachers to act more innovatively - Give each other ideas on how to be innovative in a European dimension. - Trigger each school ́s staff to contribute with necessary changes in the education system. - Support coherence and cooperation between schools, colleges and companies. Also, by focusing on cross-curricular workshops, project-based cases, training core competences, we aimed to strengthen the students' and teachers' insight to look at a problem from different views and challenged them to think "out of the box."
The reason we applied for this project was because of our common goal to prepare our students for the rapidly changing world. We wanted to make our students aware of their part of a global world. Today education is a big challenge and only by changing our ways to educate and the way that our students learn we can compete with technological developments. Children are the key to long term changes of behavior and we all share the responsibility for our own future as well for the future as a society. The following needs were addressed during the project: - Direct contact with other languages/cultures and connection to the outside world. - improve school/parent relations - Innovative teaching/learning methods - inquiry based project learning and the safe use of technology in everyday learning. - Competences for the future. Our project focused on different facets and methods that affect and shape the students' future life by acting today and transforming the way we teach. We believed it was crucial to find inspiration from other countries that have a different schooling system and cultural background. By bringing students on the mobilities we were able to widen their horizon in other ways to solve challenges and be more innovative.