The main aim of our project "Active Students" is creating challenges for our students to be more active during the learning process and integrate the theoretical knowledge into practice by taking them out of the class. And also, our project mostly focuses on creating equal chances for students with educational, economic and family disadvantages and also schools in disadvantaged areas. And, according to this aim, the partners three of whom have no Erasmus+ project experience will give priority students with disadvantages to be chosen for the project activities. So, we will able to create equal chances for students from different levels of society to reach opportunities to develop 21st-century skills and increase social inclusion. In order to reach these aims, we have divided our project into two parts; local and international activities during which at least 100 students between 11 and 15 will have active roles. The local activities will be conducted throughout our etwinning project and they will develop our students' skills of taking responsibility by making them share the house courses and do their daily activities on their own. During these activities, especially boy students will be given tasks. And for our girl students, we will have special activities through our etwinning project and they will join activities that are regarded as "man jobs" such as carpentry, masonry, fixing leaks which will support gender equality. And also, our etwinning project will help us reach partners because they will lead and follow their students. And international activities will be carried on under the names of cultural heritages, nature, environment protection, traditional jobs, and water. During all these mobilities, students will be active learners and they will work in international teams during activities such as painting some heritage objects, designing costumes, recycling, gardening, preparing composts, wood carving, making ice-cream and pasta. Also, during these mobilities, our teachers will be accompanying persons and they will join different workshops and seminars on thinking web 2. tools, Web 3. tools, creating vocabulary books, distance learning tools, and creative teachers so that they will meet and learn new teaching tools. After these planned activities, we will have students who have developed self-esteem, foreign language, ICT and communication skills and an increased feeling of respect towards others. And also, students with disadvantages will have a stronger feeling of acceptance in society. Some of our students will discover their hidden talents and our teachers will refresh their motivation. And also, the developments will create better education environments at our schools and parents will develop a healthier communication with their schools and children. And these developments will be followed via pre and post-project questionnaires, pre and post-mobility exams, regular vocabulary exams, meetings, quizzes, and interviews. And also, we will have checklists, workbooks, deadlines, Friday and first day meetings, padlets, interviews to evaluate our project. During local and international activities, we will have some products such as paintings of some heritages, miniature physical reproductions of the most representative monuments, popular costumes, brochures, short film, flower posts, vocabulary games, a machine to depurate water. These products will be shared on different social media platforms to make our project known. As target groups, we have decided groups and ways to reach them. For example, students and teachers who won't join mobilities will be invited to join our questionnaires, competitions, and seminars. Also, they can follow our project via project corners, brochures, and posters. And also, on the last of each mobility, we will have a mobility exhibition for them so they will be able to observe all the activities and products and have chats with participants. Students with disadvantages will join the excursions that will be organized before each mobility by the host country to make students have prior knowledge about these places. As an important group, we want to reach parents via our etwinning project, seminars, and workshops on learning to learn, effective communication between students and parents. Also, they will host foreign students and our Romanian partner will invite their parents to "Eco-Fashion show" during Romania's mobility. Teachers in our area and local authorities will be invited to the seminars and workshops. And our younger students will join a workshop named "muddy hands" to create models of some important cultural heritages. We believe that our project will be a chance for partners especially the ones who don't have Erasmus experience to understand and develop European identity and vision. After the project ends, partners will apply for the Etwinning label and Eco-School and this project will be the first step of the possible Erasmus+ projects.
The goal of the project was to activate our students for practical education, to acquire basic skills in everyday life on the one hand, and to educate them in the field of environmental protection on the other. We arrived at these tasks slowly, through the steps of discovering and presenting their simple research, such as the issue of saving and purifying water and separating waste in partner countries. Subsequently, we taught the students to use waste materials to create new products as gifts for loved ones, as costumes for the carnival, as products for further use, e.g. chairs made of waste, birdhouses. As part of activities and mobilities, we tried to involve as many pupils as possible from socially weaker families, with learning disabilities. Activities took place at the international as well as local level. We very purposefully chose the topics related to our plans described in the application during the mobilities and then together with the students we organized workshops for classmates and teachers in our schools related to the sale of new skills and knowledge from mobilities. Pupils from 11 to 15 years of age took part in the mobilities, in local activities the numbers were different, but on average 50 pupils from each organization Among the local activities, we also included work on the eTwinning project, where, according to the set plan, we devoted ourselves to learning ironing, production of organic yogurt, students learned to set the table, wash and thus save water, shop and handle money (financial literacy), cooking simple meals, fixing simple things, building a birdhouse. The task was to teach students to do things themselves and to take responsibility for the creation and subsequent product. We did not divide the tasks into female and male, and thus we tried to promote gender equality. We continue our eTwinning projects and try to reach out to other partners from the EU. International activities (mobilities) always took place with mixed groups, where students solved problems such as saving water, cleaning it, separating waste and creating new products from waste material, together they made chairs, learned to paint using traditional techniques (Ebra), and together they also cooked traditional foods, planted trees, created different costumes and then presented them in a fashion show, created a composting plant, created a leaflet to spread their knowledge about composting, miniatures of cultural monuments. In both types of activities (local and international), we involved as many pupils as possible with learning problems and from socially weaker conditions, who gained a greater feeling of acceptance by society. The teachers did not only act as accompanying persons, but participated in workshops, together with the students created tutorials for practical teaching, organized and were part of lectures on the use of web 2 and web 3 tools, and shared knowledge and skills from their schools. In this way, they motivated each other to create a motivational environment for students and combine practical teaching as well as teaching of general subjects with ICT technology and applications such as Canva, Capcut, Bookcreator, Escape Room, Nearpod, Mozawebeducation, Kahoot, Rytr.me, Aiva. Pupils as well as teachers increased their communication skills in the English language, pupils developed self-esteem, increased their sense of respect for themselves but also for others and especially for other cultures, they discovered their hidden talents. Monitoring the achievement of project goals took place by testing language skills at the local level during the course of the project, by communicating with students to avoid stressing them, by communicating with parents and family members on the topic of increased help for children in households. As products of activities at the local and international level, practical teaching tutorials created by pupils were created, which were published online brochures Teacher's guide to practical teaching, a website containing the essential steps of our cooperation to motivate other schools, an eTwinning project where all local and international practicals are documented activities, a brochure of documented activities of our partnership, a dictionary of the most important terms for children in the partner languages and in English, a FB group where we publicly shared mobility experiences. We shared the mentioned products with the public, other schools through the local press, school websites, FB groups of schools, local television, local websites and through Erasmus plus a visible place in the school premises. Not only the students and teachers of the participating mobilities helped with the products, but also the students and teachers from the schools with their creativity and artistic sensibilities. In addition to pupils and teachers in schools, we also reached out to parents and family members and the local public by organizing workshops where our pupils were taught to create from waste material. Our project does not end after the grant period has expired. We are constantly continuing to create new topics and activities through eTwinning and we are working to continue through the Erasmus plus challenge. We will try to get the quality mark through eTwinning.