„Welcome to our town – welcome to new friends“ – this is the title of our project. We are 5 schools from Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. Each school has experiences with migration, minorities and heterogeneity. In our project we aim to improve the development and the climate at our schools. Welcome to our town - welcome to new friends - this includes several aspects. During our project we create an app for mobile phones. It will be an app that shows the city map of each partner school, where all points of interests are marked and explained. Our students will write, draw, make audios/videos for filling this app with information. First they will discuss what is interesting to show: typical houses, schools, playing grounds, sights, favourite places of our students … In our app all points of interests will be shown in different categories (shown by different colours). For really welcoming everybody (tourists, migrants, refugees…) we plan to translate these descriptions to many languages. For this work all people with knowledge of foreign languages at our schools are involved to create a multilingual application. We have many migrants and we want them to take part as experts for languages. So our students with migration background as well as their parents and families will be precious and important for our project. We plan to organize regularily meetings (language-cafés) for this common work. At our language-cafés parents with migration background will also teach songs/words/sentences in their native language. During these language-cafés they can meet and get in contact with other people. Hopefully they can feel during this work that they are welcome to our towns and welcome to new friends. We hope that this common work will change the climate at our schools and communities to a climate of openness, integration and tolerance. Being different should be noticed as chance and enrichment. After the 2 years of project work we will pay for the licenses for Google Play Store for Android and Apple App Store, so that our app will be available for one more year for everybody. We can imagine that after this year the tourist informations of our towns will be interested in going on with this application. Such an application is a big chance for us to show our ideas of welcoming and involving many different people not only in our region but to much more. We want to show to as many people as possible that in our project people from different countries, with different cultures and religions work together as friends. We hope that by using the app many people will get to know our project, get to know Erasmus and have positive associations with Europe. This project is also a chance for a positive development at our schools. During those 2 years we plan to visit each partner school for one week. During these weeks teachers from all partners will meet at the same place and get to know the school system and the special aspects of each partner’s school. We will focus espacially on the methods how the partners are dealing with heterogeneity, because each partner has very interesting approaches (for example open education, inclusion, special learning environments, learning ladders, bilingualism...) By exchanging our experiences and learning from our partners we expect a positive development at our own schools. Welcome to our town - welcome to new friends - this concernes also our contacts to our partners. Our students will get in contact with the children from other countries by exchanging letters and art works. They will meet each other in chats and skype-conferences. They will explain each other their hometowns by exchanging the information they prepared for the app. We expect that our common work for the app and the contacts with students from other countries will teach our students that diversity is a chance and an enrichment, so that they can feel togetherness with students from other countries. Digitization is the method for reaching our aims. For filling the application with information our students will use new media a lot. So we expect also to improve their IT competences during our project.
„Welcome to our town – welcome to new friends“ – this is the title of our project. We are 5 schools from Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. Each school has experiences with migration, minorities and heterogeneity. In our project we aimed to improve the development and the climate at our schools. Welcome to our town - welcome to new friends - this included several aspects. During our project we created an app for mobile phones. It is an app that shows the city map of each partner school, where all points of interests are marked and explained. Our students/teachers wrote explications and made pictures for filling this app with information. First they discussed what is interesting to show. In our app all points of interests are shown in different categories (shown by different colours). These categories were chosen: touristical sights, educational sights, favourite places of the students, environment, sport- and playgrounds. For really welcoming everybody (tourists, migrants, refugees…) we translated these descriptions to different languages. For this work all people with knowledge of foreign languages at our schools were invited to help to create a multilingual application. We have many migrants and we invited them to take part as experts for languages. So our students with migration background as well as their parents and families were precious and important for our project. We planned to organize regularily meetings (language-cafés) for this common work. Because of Corona these meetings with parents weren't possible at the beginning of the project. We started to work with our migrants later and plan to involve them even after the official end of the project, because we want to go on working with the app and with languages. We expect that this common work will change the climate at our schools and communities also in the future to a climate of openness, integration and tolerance. Being different should be noticed as chance and enrichment. This we already started during the project. We had planned to pay for the licenses for Google Play Store for Android and Apple App Store for one more year, so that our app will be available for one more year for everybody. The tourist informations of our towns and also the mayors are interested in supporting this application. Such an application is a big chance for us to show our ideas of welcoming and involving many different people not only in our region but to much more. We can show to as many people as possible that in our project people from different countries, with different cultures and religions work together as friends. By using the app many people will get to know our project, get to know Erasmus and have positive associations with Europe. But we couldn't solve all problems concerning data protection issues until the end of the project. At the platform with the project results you can find a video how the app looks like. And as soon as all data protection issues are solved we will publish our app as we originally had planned. This project was also a chance for a positive development at our schools. During those 2 years we visited each partner school for one week. During these weeks teachers from all partners met at the same place and got to know the school system and the special aspects of each partner’s school. We focussed espacially on the methods how the partners are dealing with heterogeneity, because each partner has very interesting approaches (for example open education, inclusion, special learning environments, learning ladders, bilingualism...) By exchanging our experiences and learning from our partners we got ideas and inspiration to a positive development at our own schools. Welcome to our town - welcome to new friends - this concerned also our contacts to our partners. Our students got in contact with the children from other countries by exchanging letters and art works. They met each other in video-conferences. They explained each other their hometowns by exchanging the information they prepared for the app. Our common work for the app and the contacts with students from other countries taught our students that diversity is a chance and an enrichment. Digitization was the method for reaching our aims. For filling the application with information our students used new media a lot. So it was possible to improve their IT competences during our project.