MONTHLY PROJECTS
Before we can understand a concept we have to remember it
Before we can apply the concept we must understand it
Before we analyse it we must be able to apply it
Before we can evaluate its impact we must have analysed it
Before we can create we must have remembered, understood, applied, analysed, and evaluated.
April 2024
Lego programming and/or robot programming
Researchers from Oxford University have published a study of the American labour market, where they come to the conclusion that up to 42% of jobs that were previously handled by people in the service sector and industry are being taken over by robots and other automated processes. With the introduction of robots in school, pupils can be given knowledge about and access to robotics technology , which is expected not only to change the nature of the future labour market, but also to replace large parts of the workforce with robots and other forms of automated processes.
But what do the pupils actually learn when robots are introduced into the classroom:
Several teachers justify the use of robots by referring to the fact that they motivate pupils and provides experiences of success.
The use of robots is also justified by the fact that it increases the pupils' technological understanding and prepares them for an expected future.
Robots are believed to be able to make a difference and give new confidence to special groups of pupils – i.a. the pupils you describe as 'doing pupils', who are action-oriented individuals.
In our constructive Erasmus group, we have focused on how we best include the robots in our technology teaching. Said in short: what has worked didactically in our individual schools? You can read these exciting and instructive experiences below and please use them as inspiration in your own teaching
March 2024
Digital food recipes with video and nutrition as an eTwinning project
This first month of spring we have decided to work with a eTwinning project to let our pupils get to know each other even better.
eTwinning.net is a GDPR safe platform and easily accessible to pupils. eTwinning is an initiative of the European Union that aims to encourage European schools to collaborate using information and communication technologies by providing the necessary infrastructure (online tools, services, support). We are all registered in the eTwinning action and because of that enabled to form partnerships and develop collaboration with all of our colleagues.
Ιt is commonly known that a person’s health is based on a proper and healthy diet.
Therefore this month’s task has been about how to deal with healthy nutrition and at the same time exchange traditional recipes and this way getting to know our different eating habits and our favourite meals and this getting to know each other even better.
Our product this month has been digital recipes and videos related to healthy diet as well as dishes associated with your culture all made by our pupils. This way, we are able to cook and enjoy each other’s dishes. Please have a look at some of our results below and scrren pictures from our eTwinning page.
February 2024
Programming with Micro:Bits
The BBC micro:bit is a micro-controller - or a mini-computer, which has been developed by the BBC and a number of other partners. This small computer can be used in teaching in many different professional contexts.
A micro:bit consists of a circuit board with i.a. built-in compass, accelerometer, thermometer and light sensor. There is also built-in Bluetooth, which makes it possible to use Bluetooth devices, e.g. iPhone, to program it.
It can also be connected to batteries, which makes it more "mobile" and "free" than if it had to be powered by the computer through a cable. There are also many external components that can be connected, such as motors, speakers etc., which makes it really smart to use in e.g. natural sciences.
But many of the subjects taught at school will be able to included when you work with this exciting and easily accessible pieces of electronics.
Many of us have already worked with this small, exciting computer in the past, but with all the options micro:bit offers, you will constantly be able to find new oppertunities. At the same time, there are countless online tutorials and good ideas for didactic fun and educational courses, so a micro:bit course is almost doomed to be successful.
Read below about our exciting experiences and good ideas for your teaching.
January 2024
Working with and trying to understanding AI
As a result of new technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) now forms a larger part of our everyday life, and therefore probably also has a great influence on teaching.
If one has to try to define, AI can be defined as a computer system capable of performing intelligence-based tasks normally associated with the human mind, such as interpreting and processing information, learning, reasoning, problem solving, prediction, decision making, and sometimes creation as well. An often discussed example is OpenAI, which both frightens and arouses admiration.
In relation to teaching, AI can accelerate personalised learning, provide pupils with continuous assessment and feedback, and at the same time use learning analytics to differentiate the learning process so that the process can be adapted to the needs of individual pupils in real time
In order to be able to understand and deal with this comprehensive technology, it is important to have an understanding of how it is used and to what extent, and at the same time to have worked with it yourself.
This month we have therefore created teaching courses which help our pupils to understand the technology and at the same time also get a critical attitude towards both advantages and disadvantages. Please read our exciting results below and feel free to use our experience to make your own teaching even more exciting and relevant
December 2023
Working with and managing VR
Smartphones, computers and iPads have a new family member in VR, virtual reality, which gives a strong experience of being inside another reality. Exciting not only for games, but also for teaching and creative expression. There are many exciting possibilities in virtual reality in relation to learning, such as being able to step into a room where the experience is more present than other digital media can offer. Suddenly being able to move to the savanna, or giving the experience of standing by an erupting geyser, can be a good starting point for learning. Working productively with modern technology makes sense in several perspectives - both in relation to the learning involved in processing a substance and in the understanding of the technology itself.
The producing process provides the opportunity to process and transform knowledge and content from one modality to another - a so-called transduction. A transduction can, with proper scaffolding, create the framework for a process in which the pupils process new knowledge and, in terms of VR, also relates to presenting it to others with a technology that also includes interactivity. It is also in the producing element that the pupils build a deeper understanding of the technology.
If you are interested in learning about and being inspired by how we have worked with this exciting subject, you are welcome to read about our experiences and good suggestions for teaching courses below.
November 2023
Coding games
In order to change a technology "inside" or the technology's "way of being", you must know how it is programmed and how it can be changed. To be able to reprogram the technology, you have to know the language of the program. Although different technologies speak different languages, the ways of programming have the same syntax or grammar. Therefore, programming and coding for our pupils at school is not about learning complicated programming languages, but about gaining an understanding of the computational ways of thinking that programming is built around.
Coding is the language that tells the technology what to do. Coding is therefore a basic understanding of what the technology can be used for. But in order to learn how to create with technology, the children must learn to be creative, they must be able to solve problems and at the same time be able to find mistakes and correct them.
In advance we decided that the games did not have to be big and elaborate by any means, because we thought that many pupils would quickly get inspired and start exploring block programming and the possibilities on their own. The pupils who would not be so inspired by the actual programming part will probably enjoy drawing and designing characters and digital artefacts for their games.
We hope that many teachers can be as inspired by our teaching process as we have been. See all our exciting and easily accessible course descriptions below.
Oktober 2023
Obtainable goals for greater recycling, both in the individual pupil's home and throughout the school
Recycling and sorting of waste is more relevant than ever. We are in the midst of serious climate change, which should preferably not get worse, and in order for this not to become a reality, it is important that we reuse our resources as much as possible.
Recycling our resources can be about something as simple as sorting the daily waste both at school and in individual homes. At the same time, the exercise is about trying to minimize the consumption of e.g. food, clothes, paper, electricity, heat and all other resources.These examples can be anything from recycling clothes or bicycles etc., focusing on using electricity when it is the cheapest, calculations of how much can be saved by changing to energy saving light bulbs, how and to what the sorted waste from our own school can be recycled and how much CO2 emissions can be saved that way.
Therefore, in the month of October, we have created different courses where we focused on both the importance of greater recycling and at the same time to come up with here and now useful examples of what we can do in our local environment. These examples will act as an idea bank, which will quickly spread to all our schools.
At the same time, all teachers and other interested parties are welcome to be inspired by our exciting task. All our results can be read below.
June 2023
Protection of physical and mental health online
Children and young people represent one of the priority areas of intervention in the European political context, and the World Health Organisation has declared that the mental health of children and young people is a key area of intervention. The European Pact for Mental Health and Well-being calls on EU Member States to intervene in five priority areas, one of which is Mental Health in Youth and Education.
Mental well-being supports successful learning, and successful learning also supports mental well-being. In other words it is essential that the promotion of positive mental health is an integral part of the school context, to achieve the best possible results.
Social media and the internet can have both positive and negative effects on children and young people's mental health. Pupils can get exposed to inappropriate content, grooming, online abuse, cyberbullying and much more.
Therefore it is important that we try our best to teach the pupils how to avoid this and also teach them what to do if it happens anyway.
The exciting process this month has been to describe how we work concretely with the above problems at our individual schools. This way we can inspire all members in our group to become even better and more skilled og in the sam way produce inspiration for all the readers of this homepage
May 2023
ICT initiatives for students with special needs
Pupils with learning disabilities need varied methods and often different implementations than other pupils to reach their educational goals. Teachers have to be open minded and focus on their strengths to maintain and flourish their interest and help to inspire them to keep on going.The use of technology solutions in teaching can help this group of students a lot.
To become inspired and to learn from our experiences and the same way inspire our well performing group and readers on this platform, this month's product will describe which initiatives we have taken at our individual schools: Which ICT initiatives have we tested to provide for this particular group of pupils, what has been the effect and what can we recommend.
Please have a look below of our different approaches and get inspiration for your own work.
April 2023
UN Global Goals:
Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities
For the teachers in our cooperation the maybe most important task of educators nowadays is to bring future European citizens to be aware that we are all part of a living system. All the paths that the pupil experiences from an early age and which have as their objective the construction of paths of active citizenship, life skills, intercultural and environmental issues and legality are linked by the dimension of the relationship.
Therefore, the exciting task that we all worked with this month has dealt with concrete examples of how we, in our local environment or in a wider global perspective, help pupils to recognize and build their own identity and ownership of this goal.
March 2023
SELFIE tool - evaluation of our initiatives a year ago
Our start-up project was about setting the status of our professional level in the area of technology understanding and at the same time, setting forward-looking goals for what we would like to achieve in the area in the coming year.
This year has now passed and we have worked intensely and concentrated on the area. This work has, among other things, consisted of testing and developing our goals in practice together with our pupils, who have benefitted greatly from this process. In order to be able to reflect and, if necessary, correct our work, we have now made an evaluation based on the specific work we have done in the classes. The evaluation is both a working tool for ourselves with a special focus on the next development stages within the subject area, but at the same time an inspirational material for all participants in our exciting Erasmus + project and all others who follow us and are inspired by our results.
Feel free to be inspired by our work and have a look at our results below.
January 2023
3-d print
In January 2023 we started up a process of making purely physical products based on digital preparation. The topic this winter month offers good opportunities for both creative and innovative work while solving a very specific task.
3-d printing with pupils is a challenge because the work processes can be long and it is difficult for pupils to have the patience to complete a task and wait to receive it because of the time it takes to print.
But the exercise is good for them because they have an experience realizing the size of something they are building on the computer screen and at the same time figure out what comes out of the printer. Our experienced colleagues in Iceland made a fine instruction to this process and you can read it right here.......
Read descriptions and good ideas from our work below...
February 2023
Safer Internet Day
In the past years, Safer Internet Day has become a landmark event in the online safety calendar. Starting as an initiative of the EU SafeBorders project in 2004 and is now celebrated in approximately 200 countries and territories worldwide.
More than 100 global Safer Internet Day Committees now work closely with the Safer Internet Day Coordination Team, and for our group it has also been a great desire from the start of the project to work on this topic in the month of February.
We have therefore all made exciting projects and initiatives in relation to creating a safer internet for all our pupils. Feel free to take a look at the different approaches and be inspired to work on this very important topic yourself
January 2023
The decision of our logo competition
We have now decided which logo is the winner in our exciting logo competition with an incredible number of beautiful and creative proposals (see below).
Three of the logos were very close in terms of number of votes, but the winning logo was this beautiful logo made by pupils at Dimotiko Scholeio Makedonitissas 2 in Nicosia.
Congratulations to Cyprus
December 2022
Logo competition
In December, we worked on a technology project, which was a competition about which school could make the best-looking and most informative logo for our collaboration.
Each class involved in the project organized cooperative learning in small groups of 4-5 pupils with different creative and organizational skills. Each group first created the logo they like, first on paper and using an app/software according to their own wishes.
In step 2 each class will chose the logo to participate in the contest and the pupils voted online in a google form to find the final winner. The logos participated in anonymous form, only named with a number.
Below you can see some of the many different logos that were produced in the various countries as inspiration.
November 2022
Digital innovative proposals to save resources and energy
As an important part of a more sustainable everyday life, it is important to learn about and utilise different processes to save resources. This process is important from an early age and in November 2022 our project dealt with digital, innovative proposals on how to easily and straightforwardly save resources - all this based on energy calculations in mathematics and/or science. Here you can read all of our exciting descriptions that might inspire you and your colleagues to start up a cross border cooperation.
October 2022
Exchange of student descriptions
Would you like to introduce your students to one another? This question we asked ourselves this month and the answer was YES.
For that purpose each student wrote about himself/herself (personal info/name (or nickname), country/physical appearance/personalities/hobbies/free time activities etc.) and then the descriptions were sent to the partners' schools.
When the partner school pupils read the introductions they draw the pictures of their friends as they thought they looked. Then each school interchanged the pictures to see themselves in the eye of another child . Maybe some decided they would be digital penfriends.
Please have a looks at some pictures and descriptions of our great project and get fine inspiration this way.....
September 2022
Involvement of school management
As a very important topic in our collaboration, we focus on how to continuously involve the schools' management in our collaboration. This way, we would like their help to spread our exciting benefits and experiences to our entire organisations and thus become an integral part of our future everyday life.
This collaboration does not necessarily have to take place on a monthly basis, but to ensure a good and even implementation, it is important to have a meeting plan that describes, for example, an annual cycle.
There is a difference in how we ensure this anchoring in our respective countries and this is described in individual school plans which you can read fine examples of here.
June 2022
Eating seasonally reduces the demand for out-of- season produce which further supports more local produce and supports local farming in your area which means less transportation, less refrigeration, less greenhouses.
It is important to note that it is not always possible to eat locally and seasonally for everyone all of the time. It is more about the importance of making decisions that are better for you, your economy and health and maybe most importantly: Making decisions to protect our climate.
The product this month is a description of a meal made with in-season products from our local area/region.
It is our hope that our products ready to download will serve as inspiration for many of our pupils and families across borders and also as inspiration for pupils and families everywhere.
MAY 2022
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is a legally-binding international agreement setting out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of every child, regardless of their race, religion or abilities.
196 countries have signed up since it was adopted by the United Nations in November 1989. All countries that sign up to the UNCRC are bound by international law to ensure it is implemented.
Here you can see examples of and explanations about how we have approached the task. You will also find out how we make the children's convention visible at our schools.
APRIL 2022
Understanding computers and learning the basics of coding helps children to develop an appreciation of how things work. This is a very important reason why coding needs to be taught at schools, so pupils learn these skills while they are young. The ability to solve problems is a trait that is useful in everyday life in general.
Computer programming is also a great way for students to develop their analytical skills and problem-solving abilities. This skill set will come in handy not only in the tech industry, but in other fields as well such as education and everyday life.
Computer programming promotes logical thinking
Learning to code helps a student’s creativity
When students learn to code, they develop persistence
Coding helps to develop resilience
Learning to code can improve a child’s communication skills
Children improve their structural thinking when learning to code
Coding helps children with problem-solving
Coding improves students’ maths skills
Coding gives students satisfaction
Coding helps kids learn to learn
MARCH 2022
In March we have tried out unplugged programming which can be defined as “lessons in which pupils are not working on a computer”.
This activity can be used in both primary and secondary school if the pupils have not yet tried out programming and need to understand the basic concept in relation to coding.
FEBRUARY 2022
SELFIEforTEACHERS is an online tool to help primary and secondary teachers reflect on how they are using digital technologies in their professional practice. Teachers can use the tool to learn more about the digital skills they have and identify areas where they can develop further.
You will need an EU Login account to access the tool. If you need to make an account click here….
Sign-up is easy and any teacher in Europe or anywhere in the world can use the tool for free.
Development opportunity:
Helps to reflect on competence and practice
Helps to foster collaboration among teachers
Helps to stimulate further use of technologies to enrich teaching and learning and create diversified learning experiences
Helps to identify areas for improvements
Helps to define professional development needs and plan professional learning path
Based on our result, each school has pointed out at least three areas of development, which will be the focus the coming year