Tarsus Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi
Tarsus Vocational and Technical High School was built in 1961 and began with education in leveling (machine) and furniture section and now is the most comprehensive educational school of the region. I.e, within the framework of MEGEP it has been selected as a pilot institution and has been sustaining its activities since 2004. Furthermore, being supported by and within the framework of collaboration of TURKISH-JAPANESE (JAICA), our school has upgraded to automatization and has begun this type of education. Our school is characterized as an institution providing training by 160 staff and to around 2.500 students. Also there are 60 disadvantaged (physical, economic, cultural) students in our school. In our school we have Machine Technology, Metal Technology, Chemical Technology, Wood Technology, Electric-Electronic Technologies, Information Technology and Automatization Technology Fields. We are one of 111 schools throughout Turkey in which (SVOC) Specialized Vocational Obtaining Center projects are being implemented. Empowered by that, our school gives great importance to (R&D) Research and Development. Together with attending to Regional and National, Vocational and Technical exhibitions, our school also constantly attends National Robot Building competitions.
Our school:Vision – To become a leading institution in the field of vocational and technical education by providing the training of manpower with international qualifications in our country.
Mission – To be a pioneer of technology in the developing and changing world in professional and technical education.
Our school’s motivation:
Most of today’s youth, who spend most of their days in digital media, have lack of understanding, interpretation, critical thinking skills, self-confidence due to passive life. We have observed this in our surveys on the basis of schools. It is an important motivation tool for us that, with this project, we will achieve innovative approaches in the field of Digital Talents, critical thinking, active citizenship, entrepreneurship, and improve language skills
Agrupamento de Escolas da Lixa
Our institution is a school state cluster with approximately 1920 students, 193 teachers and 60 technical and operational assistants. It includes students from primary to secondary school level, from ages 6 to 18 and offers both regular and vocational courses. It is situated in the north of Portugal and its population still has low levels of education. A small and medium-sized business structure predominates in the region, with more than half of the active population working in the manufacturing industry. We have students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, but a great number comes from families with limited economic resources.
The Educational Project of our school points out a set of values and challenges to be achieved:
• to create equal opportunities for school success as a goal for all;
• to favour the personal and social development of students, with a view to the formation of tolerant, autonomous and civically responsible citizens with a European conscience;
• to stimulate in young people an awareness of appreciation, preservation and respect for the natural and cultural heritage;
• to foster openness to new ideas, innovation, progress and new technologies throughout the educational community;
• to prepare students for insertion into a world of tolerance, respect and social involvement.
We have a stable group of teachers, with many years of teaching experience, who are committed to foster our students’ intellectual, social and emotional development. So as to better motivate and prepare our student our teaching staff has been investing in their digital skills. Realising the need to be digitally updated, in the most recent years more teachers have been taking courses related to the topic and have been implementing digital tools in their classes so as to make them more appealing and useful to the students. Our school has also been investing in some awareness raising activities regarding the safe use of the internet among students. Our students are also encouraged to use digital tools in their school work, as a way to make them more digitally competent.
Friedensburg-Oberschule
The Friedensburg Oberschule school is situated in the heart of Berlin. Around 1300 students representing more than seventy nations and learning in grades 7 to 13 are taught by over one hundred teachers. Half of our students learn in the so-called regular classes, i.e. the classes with German as the teaching language. The other half of our students learn in bilingual classes, the so-called SESB classes, in which about 50% of the courses are taught in Spanish. Moreover, both these students and the teachers of the subjects given in Spanish are native speakers of Spanish. The ‘Willkommensklassen’ was introduced in 2010 for newly-arrived foreign students and is basically meant to help them learn the German language and integrate fast in the regular or bilingual classes. Besides our bilingual profile, we also have laptop classes and professional orientation classes which deal with differentiation and the integration of media to our internal school curriculum. Our next school emblem are the `BOP`- courses (professionoriented courses), which bring students closer to real life. In courses such as sewing, crafts, orchestra, translation etc. our students get a glimpse into certain professions. Interests like theater, learning or perfectionating a foreign language, creative writing and so on find their match in the extracurricular courses we offer as a full-time day school. Our school motto is “Learning with, for and from each other”, which stands for our motivation to learn from and with other schools and cultures.
Our school has been striving for a perpetual improvement of the use of up-to-date media at school. For years now we have had a laptop class in each year, in which we use digital materials only. These classes are taught by teachers willing to work digitally and participate in regular professional development courses. We find that the personal exchange is the most important when learning new strategies, methodologies and ways of working with media in a certain subject. This is why we are highly interested in working together with teachers from different schools and exchanging our best practice with theirs.
JENSEN Gymnasium Helsingborg
Jensen gymnasium Helsingborg is a part of the company Jensen Education. The company is owned by Håkan Jensen who founded the organization in 1996. There are Jensen schools all over the country, from Malmö in the south to Uppsala just north of Stockholm. The company has schools in different school levels: elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools and adult education. JENSEN gymnasium Helsingborg was opened in 2009 and is today a well-established school in the city of Helsingborg. The high school is located in the city center and has about 220 students between the ages 15-19 years old. There are about 20 staff members where teachers, school board, administration personnel and the students health care team, consisting of a nurse and counselors, are included. There are three different programs at our school: the nature science program, the social science program and the economics and law program. We have a specific profile focusing on health and mental strength.
At our school we work a lot with computers and IT. Every student has their own Chromebook, a kind of tablet. The students work on their computers all the time, except in maths and when they read fiction, even though students with reading and writing disabilities can listen to an e-book on the computer instead of reading it. Both students and teachers work with Google apps. The Jensen Education company has even built its own IT-platform,
Jensen Campus, for teachers and students which is connected to Google apps. At Jensen Campus, students can see and hand in all their school tasks. The teachers plan all courses and the students can see what’s going to happen during each lesson. Since we only use Google apps it’s very easy to share documents and files between teachers and students. This is a very important tool for the teaching staff at our school since we work a lot with assessment for learning. The teachers don’t just give feedback to our students, we also work with feedforward and our experience from this is that the students perform better and that the results have a higher quality. It’s also easier to reach all students at their level, you can help a student with disabilities and you can challenge a student who reaches for the highest grade.
Efterskolen Solgården
Efterskolen Solgården is a Christian boarding school situated in a thinly populated part of Denmark. Our students come from all parts of Denmark and we have some from another ethnic background than Danish. We have 75-85 students from 14 to 17 years of age, and 18 teachers. Our school is situated in the western part of Jutland, and one of the goals of our type of school (“efterskole”) is for students to meet and learn from people who are different from themselves. Our students also have very different backgrounds (socially, culturally, intellectually, economically, etc). In our school, the international dimension has a strong presence. In our everyday work we are doing a great deal to give the students a broad view on the surrounding world for instance through charity projects for the Third World. We look upon this project as a good opportunity for us to get the international atmosphere even further into our little school.
Our type of school – ”Efterskole” – is a unique type of educational institution in Denmark that we want to show partly through sending some of our students and teachers out for visits and partly through the special pedagogical approach that we have in classes. We would also like to learn from other cultures and other ways of teaching. As we are a Christian school and many of our students practise Lutheran faith, it will be especially interesting for them to meet young people who practise another view of life or religion. It gives a concrete understanding and respect for other people’s cultures and choices of values, which will have a positive rub-off effect on the teachers and students’ understanding of the surrounding world.
We desire to be a part of this project because we recognize that the digital era and the everyday digital influence in our life is important and something we need to engage and reflect upon. It is true that our students are digital natives but at the same time many of them are digital illiterate being unreflective and incapable of understanding the terms and conditions of the digital world. We aim to provide our students with a critical approach towards social media and digital behavior and hence we find this project of great value.