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Harviala school staff mobilities
Start date: Dec 31, 2014, End date: Dec 30, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Harviala school is a medium-sized Finnish primary school with a total of 120 pupils aged 7-12. Our school is located in Janakkala municipality, close to the city of Hämeenlinna. A nursery school operates in the same premises with the school, nevertheless as an administratively separate unit. Since 2010 our school has run a co-operation program with the pre-school group to make the transition pois from pre-school to primary school as easy as possible. The pupils in pre-school, 1st and 2nd grades are taught environment and nature studies in workshops using mainly co-operative learning and the pupils are divided according to their individual learning styles. The teachers involved in this program work tightly together as a team in planning and teaching the lessons.The results have been very positive and due to them, the cooperation program of co-teaching environment and nature studies cross-curricularly and putting different age groups together in one teaching group will be widened to concern the upper grades in our school, too. For the transition in the teaching method it would be essential for our teachers to visit other European schools and see how team teacing, co-teaching and teaching environment and nature studies as a subject itself is implemented. This would be the first main focusing point of our project. We have planned two job-shadowing periods in two European schools and the idea is that each teacher in our school will attend a 5-day job-shadowing period in either of these schools and learn new procedures, ways of teaching, positive attitudes towards teamwork and of course positive attitudes towards international co-operation. The second main focus is ICT. ICT skills are used in every subject at school and both teachers and pupils need to learn vital digital skills. To be able to teach our pupils safe and varied uses of ICT, the teachers need constantly to be trained to be familiar with the new possibilities. Social media and its devices are strongly present at people's everyday life. Smartphones and tablets with cloud services offer endless possibilities also for educational purposes. How to effectively use the social media, cloud services, tablets, smart phones and for example a learning database in teaching, will be the areas in which we would like to improve our teachers' skills in the future. Being able to use the assistive technologies and special applications for tablets and smartphones will also give us another mean to differentiate, help and support pupils with learning difficulties. The planned action in this project will be two separate courses aimed at the teaching staff to improve their skills at using tablets and the educational applications available, and moreover, to learn to make our own applications which we can use specifically for the benefit of our pupils. The courses are arranged in Belgium and Austia and four members of our teaching staff will attend these 5-day courses. The teachers will be selected mainly based on their motivation and need for improving their professional skills. As the third "silent" focus in this project we see internationalization. Our school has been actively involved with Comenius cooperation since 2000 and we are proud of that. Working on different Comenius projects have brought Europe closer to our staff and pupils, made them more aware, and at the same time also curious, about other European countries and cultures and, most importantly, dispelled a lot of prejudices agains different cultures. Making new contacts and being able to discuss with European colleagues face-to face in this project will evolve new ideas for further cooperation in the future. The planned co-teaching project in our school will be carried our in any case in the near future and we think that this European mobility project will help our teachers to adjust to the idea of cooperation and teacmwork. The impacts of job-shadowing activites will be shown in the teachers' everyday work, opening positive attitudes towards teamwork, co-teaching possibilites, and positive attitudes towards European co-operation. The planned courses for our staff will improve the teachers' ICT skills and by learning from each other we will gain another mean to differentiate and thus motivate our pupils. Skills in using tablets and social media and their educational applications in a safe, effective way will benefit our school for a long time, no matter what subject is concerned.
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