ASSESSMENT OF THE PROJECT

Erasmus+ GIANTS project                                        June 2022

 

Assessment of the project:

  • How was the experience of participating in the GIANTS project → words that come to your mind when you think of this experience → we can build a word cloud with it for eTwinning

Experience, interesting, motivating, professional development, ICT, management skills, organization, learnings, intercultural exchange, improvement, friends, meetings, intense, different realities, emotional bonding, closeness, inclusion, challenge, team work, cooperation, collaboration, agreements, implementation, adaptability, difficulties, COVID, hard moments, good moments, workload, laugh, students, teachers, emotions, discovery, network, richness, dissemination, eTwinning, videos, mobility tool, webpage, excitement, crazy, huge, amazing, knowledge, collaboration, involvement, virtual, art, music, creativity, passion, talents, communality, inspirational


 

  • Best things about the project
  • Creating a network with other schools that are now partners
  • School development in terms of new methodologies, ICT, implementation of curricula…
  • Teacher development, not only regarding the coordinators but also regarding all the faculty at school → motivation for change, losing fear to do new things because we have been sharing experiences and spaces to make it easier, improving the English level, improving teaching skills, becoming inspired by other ways of working, 
  • Being updated with European projects
  • Internationalization strategy of the schools, using Erasmus and eTwinning
  • Attracting talent and motivated teachers due to the European school projects
  • Learning about the possibility of blended mobilities, which open the opportunity to repeat it in the future and have a much greater number of students doing intensive Erasmus activities
  • Discover art and culture from other countries and finding new ways of artistic expression.
  • Having all students included in the project activities, and specially having the opportunity to travel with them in physical mobilities, which have been a life changing experience for them. Even blended mobilities have helped students with fewer opportunities feel special, interact with partner students and do mind-broadening activities that have made them gain self esteem.
  • Parents’ and whole community involvement.
  • Increase of responsibility from the pupils in terms of the activities done.
  • Improve pupils’ participation in school activities, giving them an incentive.
  • Develop the feeling among participants of belonging while embracing the differences and acknowledging the similarities among nations. Physical mobilities were a very powerful tool in this sense, but blended also helped a lot. 
  • Making all the participating schools promote the priorities of the European Union in their societies.
  • Promoting school initiatives and the school itself through the development of the website, social media and local press
  • Students making friendships and upgrading their English language skills
  • Boosting motivation among students and the teachers to improve their language and methodological skills
  • In practical situations, students realized the importance of learning languages ​​in order to communicate and collaborate with students from other countries.
  • By getting to know other cultures, you learn to appreciate the ways in which others operate and at the same time you also learn to appreciate the culture of your own country.

 

  • Worst / most difficult things about the project
  • The amount of activities: too many activities and too much work load. 
  • Covid quarantines which hindered us from doing some activities and caused alterations to other ones because of prohibition of physical proximity among pupils from different classes.
  • Due to COVID we could not mix up classes for almost 2 years and it made difficult to do some of the activities.
  • The obligation to motivate colleagues to participate especially when there were other priorities in the school due to the Covid situation.
  • Lack of proper equipment or having faulted equipment to do some activities that involve ICT tools.
  • Motivate other teachers to participate and do activities: some teachers feel anxious or not ready to do new activities. 
  • COVID also generated a negative mood or a little bit depressive, everybody is lacking energy to do things, especially difficult or new things.
  • COVID made it difficult to communicate with other teachers, since it was impossible to see physically eachother or help each other in the classes.
  • Sometimes COVID didn’t allow doing activities because classes were closed.
  • to reach parents - in some schools (Czech one) it is difficult to get some response from parents → specially on questionnaires for families
  • the expiry of the initially planned ICT tools to be used: Quizdom (we changed to Genailly), HP Reveal (which we substituted by Halo AR), Quiversion changed and most of the things became payable. Also some tools became payable, such as Rakugaki, Brick-it or Pixton.
  • coordinators’ stress related to following the schedule of activities and dealing with the effects of Covid-19 effects 
  • the obligation to adapt the project activities to be as much effective as possible when done virtually or in a blended form. It was specially challenging for Blended mobilities, which were fully new activities to all of us, participants and specially organizers.
  • planning and realization of the blended mobilities in a way as applied in a project form with the approximately positive results and feedback
  • Too many activities in the whole project all in all. We didn’t have enough time to do activities as well as we wanted. 
  • Documenting the tasks done was really laborious and time consuming.  Twinspace set its own inconveniences for uploading materials.  The same materials also had to be uploaded to ourerasmus page, which also did not always work as it should. 
  • Some of the tasks, queries and assessments should have been done during the school summer holidays. In Finland, June is already a holiday month). 
  • 3 of the project coordinators changed along the project and it required everybody to adapt to each other and relearn many things. Also the main project coordinator changed in the middle of the project and all the team had the challenge to readapt and learn the expertise of the leaving coordinator. 

 

What were the main difficulties we faced:

  • How did we manage to overcome them
  • Covid - project was prolonged, we took activities slowly
  • We communicated a lot - it is important to explain when something is done 

 

  • Good practices and learnings in terms of management
  • Frequent virtual meetings among the people involved.
  • Sharing all agreements in Google Drive and in general using Drive to share documents while we were working ont he activities.
  • Being supportive of participants who face difficulties with activities.
  • Assign roles:

       → different roles in the cooperative activities

       → different roles among the coordinators in order to help each other

  • well-organised documentation of the planned activities and coordinators’ common agreements supporting the process of project realisation 
  • flexibility, openness and easy adaptation to the alternative solutions suggested by the coordinators’ team in the most critical moments of the project duration 
  • online meetings (blended mobilities) - well organised, a lot of people could participate
  • webinars for teachers - a lot of teachers could attend
  • Having more than 1 coordinator in each school helped in being more effective and energetic.
  • Having all activities organized by months so that we can organize
  • Horizontal leadership when taking decisions 
  • By accepting the fact that not everything can be done exactly as planned.  The difficulties can be overcome by changing the plans so that they can be implemented in different ways in different circumstances.

 

How to ensure the sustainability of the learnings done in our schools

  • What can we do to assure these learnings are applied to our schools?
  • Motivate colleagues to add some of the things learnt in their curriculum.
  • Participate in more international projects (eTwinning or Erasmus).
  • Foster further dissemination of the project results: seminars, publications, posts..
  • Include specific activities in the different classes syllabus.
  • Create further eTwinning projects together with the current partners.
  • Purchasing some of the apps that used: Padlet, Rakugaki, Kahoot,...
  • Start using new teaching methods on a permanent basis from the beginning of becoming school year and linking them to your school's annual curriculum plan.

 

Learnings for future projects:

  • Things we have to improve in further Erasmus projects

Being on time with the activities

Having less activities

Using activities that can include in the syllabus, to make them more meaningful and relevant for the school project

Offer as job shadowing hosting school

Use the tools used as innovations for the school

Ensure that the project does not become too broad, by focusing only on one or two main topics in more depth.

Keeping in mind that we need to study a lot of other things at school too. The school cannot focus solely on the Erasmus project, but it is a part that diversifies and enriches the teaching and learning in the school community.

 

  • How could the eTwinning platform be used in a better way?
  • Use eTwinning platform so that students share their own material, they upload the material and communicate more amongst them using the platform.
  • Not using it as a showroom but also as an interactive tool for students who are working on the project.
  • The eTwinning platform itself needs improvements!!!! It’s old fashioned version and doesn’t give us the possibility to use new ICT-tools that are better and easier when working with students.