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Challenging Communication in a Committing Community
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The new generation of students is raised in a world where everything changes at a rapid pace; they are accustomed to overwhelming amounts of information, juggling multiple types of social media and countless forms of entertainment. The students are fundamentally different from the ones coming before them - therefore we as educators have to develop our ways of teaching to fit the demands and needs of this new generation. We have discovered that traditional classroom teaching has a tendency to be ineffective und uninspiring for some students. More and more students cannot see the relevance of education and fail to participate in lessons in an active way; others even make the choice to leave school early. With this project we hope to inspire our colleagues as well as ourselves to do better - to aim higher. The title of our project is “Challenging Cooperation in a Committing Community”. Our goal is to modernize teaching methods and techniques by changing typical classroom teaching into student-centered learning environments where we use ICT in collaborative cross-curricular projects. We believe this way of working will generate a feeling of relevance amongst our students and motivate them into participating and provide the students with important skills they can apply later in life (organizational skills, creativity, methodology and collaboration). Letting the students work in international teams will help prepare our student for a future in a world that’s getting smaller and a Europe that’s getting more united. We feel that we as educators are responsible for training our students in being active participants on an international scale. By involving our students in a European project, we hope to develop their international comprehension and give them an experience of being a part of something bigger - the feeling of solidarity as members of the European Union. We strive to give our students a greater understanding of democracy and increase tolerance for different cultures by letting them with themes and methods that challenge their normal way of thinking and force them to participate in the democratic process. We live in democratic countries in different parts of Europe. The young people in the areas we live in are quite isolated when it comes to meeting people from other countries face-to-face. By innovating cooperative projects combined with mobility meetings we will open the door to Europe and help them realize that Europeans have a lot in common and we need each other. Through experience we have discovered that students using ICT in a learning environment are more focused and eager to complete tasks because they use tools they find interesting. ICT tools are excellent for cooperation and intend to equip our students with as much knowledge of ICT as possible. During the project we will work with the topics: Gyro Gearloose (inventions), Democracy, Expression and Freedom. By choosing these specific themes we hope to inspire our students to debate, argue their case, solve problems, challenge themselves and each other creatively, and partake in democratic processes like casting a vote. We will work in student-centered learning environment where we create a foundation for the students to work from. The pupils will be problem solvers, designers, debate leaders, project managers and more in the different challenges they will be presented with. The involved teachers will provide the students with the necessary knowledge and know-how(various ICT tools, arts and crafts techniques ect.) to help and support the ideas of the students; they will inspire and encourage the students in the hope of building a venue for understanding and creativity. Most importantly the participating teachers will also provide the students with feedback and feed forward. Our experience from former projects is that students, who claim they cannot speak nor communicate in English, raise their self-confidence when they meet students from other countries because they get a feeling of achievement. It is our belief that creating an environment where the students are more active players will further raise the confidence of our pupils and give them a greater sense of self-worth. Ultimately the newfound success may spread to the daily classroom and encourage students and teachers to work differently. We want to arrange a mobility meeting for students and teachers every half year in our schools, as we believe the physical transnational meetings are important. You feel more committed to someone you have met - as a consequence the following projects after the mobility meetings in the classes among students and teachers will be of a higher quality and the participants will feel more responsible. By working in transnational teams the feeling of togetherness and acceptance between our countries will grow naturally and many stereotypes will be refuted. This will create a greater understanding of each other as well as other EU-countries
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