The topic of sustainability is to be dealt with more intensively in the classroom. We want to give the students ideas for action and encourage them to think. As a school, we want to reduce our ecological footprint, save energy, separate waste correctly and avoid unnecessary waste as much as possible. In some areas our hands are tied (e.g. energy efficiency of the building, as this can only be improved by expensive investments), but in small areas (switching off lights, not tilting windows, reducing heating) we can make progress. There are numerous publications on this topic, but they are not always practical, thus we wanted to to develop a concept and materials suitable for teaching at our school. The factor "time" was identified as a recurring problem in implementing the topic of sustainability in the classroom. Teachers are assigned more and more organizational tasks, the documentation obligation is constantly increasing and this consumes a lot of working time, in the classroom as well as at home. Therefore, we were looking for methods to outsource routine activities to the computer, so that we have more working time to prepare the teaching topics that are important to us. We wanted to use e-learning to implement these important areas. This will ensure that ideas and materials can be more easily shared, modified and reused. There are already attempts to use online platforms to collect and share teaching materials. This effort was intensified and the execution was optimized. In the past, "sharing" and "co-working" was still very time consuming. The overarching goal ist thus not only to effectively manage instructional materials, but more importantly to share best practices that will lead to increasing quality of our lessons. The need for professionalization of e-learning has become increasingly apparent in the past. Even though the use of computers has been implemented in teaching already, a more diverse and targeted way needed to be found.
Our intentions for this project were to improve the use of our technical resources to enhance sustainability. Our school encourages the use of laptops in all classes of upper forms and since December 2021 also in lower forms. Additionally our school provides approximately 100 school computers for students of the lower forms to work with. The reason for this project was to ultimately use these technological devices more intensively and, above all, in a more targeted manner, both for subject lessons and for contact with students from partner schools. The improved use of these devices will assist in developing of a cross-national and cross-curricular project on the topic of sustainability. However, this requires more personal contacts, especially in the area of eTwinning.