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An Intercultural School Opens Up and Goes Digital
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The title of our project is "An Intercultural School Opens Up and Goes Digital". Our school is the 9th Primary School of Ioannina – School of Intercultural Education. In our school, 20% of the students have an immigrant background, which is associated with high degree of linguistic and cultural diversity within the classroom. The main objective of our project is to effectively manage the linguistic /cultural diversity of our students through the provision of differentiated/individualized teaching by means of Web 2.0 tools and the e-learning platform, moodle. By doing so, we want to improve the performance of monolingual and bilingual students, in an effort to mitigate the difficulties often faced by the latter. The teachers that will participate in the project are permanent staff with considerable experience in teaching multicultural classes, higher qualifications (M.A./M.S.c/ Ph.D.) and some familiarity with the use of ICT. Their selection was based on the above criteria. The majority of the participating teachers will be trained in the targeted use of ICT as a means to achieve the program objectives. A small part of the group will be trained in the use of English for Educational purposes, given that the language is widely used in digital education. The planned mobility activities are two: the first is organized by the organization “ITC International” and it involves participants attending the following programs ( in groups, according to their needs and expertise): ICT in Education Course, Innovative Approaches to Teaching, Literacy Across Subjects and English for Educators and Administrative Staff. The second activity is organized by the organization “Pixel Associazione Culturale” and involves the participation of a selected part of the trained staff in the conference "ICT in Language Learning". Our teachers will deliver oral presentations reporting the first results from the classroom application of the ICT training they received in the first mobility activity. Besides the participation of the staff in the training activities,the methodology followed for the implementation of our mobility project involves the organization and management of collaborative digital projects by our teachers. This will allow the full utilization of the school's e-learning platform, through which we plan to provide individualized support and teaching to all our students. To this end, the design of the online courses will follow the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology. Through the moodle platform, activities in various subjects ( e.g. Language , Mathematics , History , Geography ) will be offered not only in Greek , but also in the mother tongue of our bilingual students, as well as in the foreign languages taught at school ( English, French /German). Crucial for the completion of our project is the dissemination of the knowledge acquired by our staff by means of in person and electronic seminars and workshops organized under the auspices of the Regional Directorate of Primary and Secondary Education of Ipiros, as well as through staff participation in conferences. As regards the participating staff, the expected results and impact concern their improvement in the design of online courses and the use of ICT for individualized teaching, the increase of their ability to organize European programs and collaborative digital activities, as well as their improvement in the use of English for educational purposes. The expected impact on our school is described as follows: increase in the interaction and cooperation between staff, between teachers and students, as well as between all the involed local educational institutions and bodies, revision of the teaching practices in accordance with the needs of the digital age , improvement of the performance of monolingual and, crucially, bilingual students, cooperation with European centres and schools, strengthening of the school's European dimension. The potential long-term benefit is that, upon the successful completion of the program, the school, could evolve to be a point of reference promoting the dissemination of knowledge on innovative teaching methods, not only at local , but also at national and European level. In this way, it may be able to overcome geographical and other limitations associated with its nature as a ' special ', intercultural school with high degree of student diversity, a feature which for some may be associated with difficulty, disfunction and underachievement, but for us serves as a challenge motivating constant improvement.

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