About the Project
We are four secondary schools from Sweden, Finland, Portugal and Germany our project is based on two educational fields of our schools, digital competence and individual support. Years 7, 8 and 9 take part in the project and the schools as a whole benefit from the process and the results.
We are preparing our students for a global and digital society. Therefore, we work with new media like iPads in our schools and we want to use it effectively. We want to improve our teaching methods and the learning strategies of our pupils by integrating new media and we want to work constantly together with other European schools in our lessons by using new media. Our goal is to improve the digital competence of students and teachers. Therefore, we need to work on transnational level. The transnational exchange of experience, knowledge and information is essential for modern education.
Digital competence is not only the ability to use specific tools or applications; this is just one of the several competence areas that need to be developed by users. Other areas are innovation, communication, collaboration, sharing, evaluation and problem solving. In the course of the project the pupils use and evaluate apps. They have to consider what the app is needed for, remembering, understanding, applying or creating, and choose the right app for their task. We compared our curricula and decided on topics we work on. In this way contents like videos explaining learning contents by pupils for pupils and other materials can be exchanged with the partner schools.
Individual support is one requirement for self-managed and individual learning, an important issue both at our schools and in the modern society.
Therefore, one aspect of the evaluating criteria for the apps is the possibility to initiate self-managed and individual learning with apps.
We want to give the best support to all our pupils. The individual support of pupils is the base for self-managed learning. We want to optimize our supporting concepts based on the project work. We want pupils and teachers to compare the existing supporting systems at the partner schools and to develop a plan, how each school can optimize its own concept. Working in a transnational project allows us to compare the school systems of different European countries including their different approaches. Comparative studies on this level can only be done in transnational projects.
The learning activities are an important part of the working process. On national level apps are used by classes. A suggestion on how they can be evaluated is set up. In international workgroups at the learning activities, the apps are presented and the evaluation instrument is discussed and decided on. During the learning activities we focus on collaborative methods and pupil presentations. We prepare our pupils for a global economy and society, working in international teams needs cultural competences. These competences can’t be developed only by cognitive processes. A change of habits and attitudes is linked to emotional experiences. Another advantage is that staying in a host family enables the pupils to gain experiences concerning numerous cultural aspects.
The results of this project are the project website and the brochure “Comparative studies in the collaboration with international partners to improve innovative learning methods”. The brochure is published on the website and the apps are evaluated by our evaluation instruments. Visitors of our website can evaluate the apps as well. We want to encourage other schools to use new media and reflect the use of new media.