Working at the times of a pandemic

Although online communication is the essence of each eTwinning project and work at the times of Covid-19 pandemics has changed all human activity making people work from home more, some advantages and disadvantages of this type of work should be mentioned:

1. At the beginning of the schoolyear we started as usual - all students and teachers in their classrooms, discussing the project issues together at schools:

2. Our next step was blended learning. Polish and Greek students started learning partly at school and parttly from homes. After a short time it turned out that they had to stay at home all the time.

German students, wearing their facemasks, were still at school. Therefore we organized a meeting of all the project participants. German students, learning in their school building, invited their Polish and Greek partners. We met on the Big Blue Button platform within their school moodle platform:

It was like a virtual trip to the partner school in Germany.

Afterwards, Polish students were invited to Greece thanks to their Webex platform:

And another virtual trip (this time to Greece, took place:)

All was preceeded by the teachers-coordinators meeting using Adobe Connect within TwinSpace:

3. Anyway the next step was staying at home and communicating not only with our foreign partners via messengers but also with our next-door neighbours, meaning class- and schoolmates. The German school had been closed by the local health authorities for two weeks in November 2020. Students were in homeschooling between 11 January and 19 February 2021 when they returned to school in alternating groups on A and B days until school was closed again by the city of Hagen on 24 March (three days before the Easter holidays).

Such confinement is not easy for anybody. However work in small international groups started. Thanks to online lessons, students got much more advanced at online communication and meeting using messengers/conference platforms became their everyday reality. So the pandemic enabled international work on a very good level as students additionally explored such tools:

And first of all TwinSpace forums - for mutual communication.

4. Lockdown in Europe unfortunately did not let students go and explore the subject of their cities as much as they wanted. They planned to meet some representatives of municipal institutions to interview them in order to compare their image of future smart cities with their present state. In the autumn some confrontations were possible (but mostly thanks to their observing skills: they discussed the present smart solutions in public transport, systems of payment, their own schools, rubbish removal etc) so that they could elaborate on the topics and present their smart solutions of the future.

Who knows? Maybe their ideas will soon become the solutions in our cities? Let's keep our fingers crossed.

The whole project was a great enetrprise, very difficult to carry out, as each participant had to adjust their methods of work to the existing conditions.

Smart houses

Smart schools

Smart city amenities

Smart payments

Smart public transport

Smart assistants

Project & Schools

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