The 5th and final Learning Activity of our project “IT or not IT? – reaching our goals equipped with modern tools”, was hosted by Vyšší odborná škola and Střední odborná škola, Březnice in the Czech Republic from the 13th – 17th of June 2016. The Czech school welcome 24 students and 10 teachers from partner schools from Spain, Croatia, Cyprus and Poland.
The programme started off with an opening ceremony where students presented their schools using some of the tools found in out IT tool Bank. It was a good opportunity to inform guests, staff, students of Czech school and the public about our project. The ceremony was recorded by a regional TV station, which interviewed the coordinator and some of the students involved in the project. After the ceremony students met outside for sporty ice-breaking activities, which were a lot of fun and helped them get to know each other better.
During the week students took part in three workshops: The first workshop focused on how to create and on-line magazine with the application Joomag. Students were divided into six international teams in which they distributed tasks which were to be done in the magazine. During the whole week they gathered information about the stay in the Czech Republic. Their work included writing articles in English about things they did and saw, interviews of their foreign friends, photos, videos vlogs and advertisements. This activity gave students the opportunity to develop their writing and speaking skills in English, to be creative and work collaboratively. In the second workshop participants of the project learned how to create infographic posters using the web application Piktochart. During this workshop students used data that they had prepared and sent to DropBox before the meeting. In twos they worked on creating a poster about famous people, from partner countries who had or still have European influence or invented something that is used in Europe and the world. Infographic posters are a fun and quick way to learn new things about a topic, person, etc., without having to read a lot of information. It was great that we were able to learn more about each other’s history, famous personalities and inventions. Some of the posters correlated with out sub-topic “my digital country – my digital Europe”.
The third workshop was about basic programming in C# using IDE Visual Studio. It was the idea and personal initiative of three of our IT students involved in this Erasmus+ project. They prepared the codes, material and lead the workshop themselves. The students´ task was to put together some basic coding to make two stick men run across their PC screen. For some it was easier than for others and it was fun.
Besides workshops students participated in a geocaching game. First they had to find and count various objects to put together two eight digit numbers, which would help them find a specific location with a hidden treasure. The coordinates were collected during cultural excursion in the towns of Březnice (Monday) and a nearby bigger town Příbram (Tuesday), where we visited Březnice Castle and Synagogue, and also Holy Hill and the Mining Museum in Příbram. On Thursday the geocaching teams used their mobiles, GPS and the gathered coordinates to find the location of the hidden treasures in the local woods. Teams were dropped off near the woods and with the help of the GPS and maps all teams successfully reached the meeting point and found the caches.
One of the aims of our project is to make lessons and learning more interesting we invited the Bear Education Theatre Company to our school. This theatre company focuses on interactive teaching of English in schools and I think that the students enjoyed the performance very much. It was great that they could understand almost everything and that the actors involved them in the performance.
We spent one day (Wednesday) in Prague, where the Czech students prepared a guided tour for their foreign guest. In the afternoon we took part in team building activities to enhance cooperation and collaboration, which is another aim of our project. Students were locked in a chamber (MindMaze) and had to work together and use logic to get out of it within an hour. Four out of six teams were successful! Thereafter we visited the amazing interactive “Invisible Exhibition”, which show how blind people practically live their everyday life. This social activity was very interesting and it also showed that modern digital technology is a great help in the lives of people with special needs.
Our week ended on Friday with students presenting their Joomag magazines and Piktochart posters. The students did a good job with their presentations which were interesting and fun. Thereafter all the teams were given participation certificates and we closed off with a farewell barbeque. The two years of our project seem to have flown by very fast, but we have a lot to look back on, each Learning Activity in partner schools was a unique and wonderful experience that all of us will never forget. We have made lifelong friendships, connections, learned many new things and exchanged good practice. We are grateful to Erasmus+ for making this project possible