Ready - Set - Step Up!

Erasmus+ KA1 project in Primary School Strahoninec

Project "Ready – Set – Step Up!" deals with improving the quality of school and preparing for the future with the use of ICT - new technologies for the benefit of students, teachers and society, the development of digital competences, new teaching methods in formal and informal Learning and encouraging the creativity of teachers and students. In order to motivate students to learn and work more, to encourage their talents and innovation through creativity, we start from strengthening the competences and knowledge of our teachers, who will bring the innovations into their teaching and curriculum thus improving quality of the school. The European Development Plan envisages activities aimed at acquiring additional knowledge, skills and competences in the field of new teaching methods, creativity and ICT, and through the project we plan to cultivate tolerance, interculturality, social inclusion and positive attitudes to living in the EU community as active members of society. We will achieve this by sending eight teachers to professional development, job shadowing, structured
courses and teaching assignments in Europe.

The main goals of the project are to raise the quality of the school through improved and new teaching methods, use of ICT tools, curriculum innovation, as well as raising and encouraging thecreativity of teachers and pupils. We plan to achieve those in cooperation and crosscurricular activities in linguistic, media-ICT, sports and art areas with international cooperation. Teachers or lower and upper primary grades will go to the courses, and the topics they will address are structured visits to schools in Iceland, the use of video in teaching (Greece) and creative thinking (Turkey). In addition, we plan the periods of job shadowing for observation of the partner institutions in Gran Canaria, and for the first time, teaching assignments in Spain. The results of professional development will first be reflected in the curriculum of the individual subject, and then in the drafting of other plans and programs required for the school curricula. Additional value of the project we see in the creation of new materials that will be available on the web of schools in the form of open online educational resources, courses and content. The transfer of newly acquired competences and knowledge will be achieved within the school staff, and we expect most teachers to use new ICT knowledge to moderalize their teaching and make learning more interesting and accessible to learners.

The impact of the project is planned to be extended to other interest groups through dissemination that will take place at local, regional, national and international level, after each mobility and at the end of the evaluation of the project. Participants of the mobility will extend their knowledge and competences through seminars, lectures and workshops at school, regional, and national level and wider via more media, newspaper articles, journal publications and the Internet. For the purpose of the project, we will open an eTwinning project, and on the Twinspace page we'll post the materials from the training, as well as cooperation activities with partner schools. With the evaluation of the project, we will eventually see whether the objectives have been successfully achieved and whether the school has achieved better quality, which will be manifested in the next school year.

The mobilities in the project:

1. Gran Canaria - job shadowing

2. Iceland - visiting schools and institutes

3. Spain - teaching assignment

4. Greece - video publishing

5. Turkey - creative thinking

During the epidemic the project has been extended until October 2022. The project activities will continue in other eTwinning projects - for 2021 Future Schools for Climate available here: https://twinspace.etwinning.net/128708/home