2nd LTT - Crensovci, Slovenia
The involved participants were part of a professionally and didactically rich LTT activity. We changed the title to “Best practices of international and national cooperation”. We also changed the duration and content with our partners from OŠ Janeza Kuharja Razkrižje, since it was more suitable for us to host a longer LTT activity due to the objective we wanted to achieve with all of our activities in that week and the conclusion of two large national projects in combination with our two Erasmus+ project in order to achieve a higher impact and added value of the combined activities. We had a project meeting to discuss the open matters in the project. We had a combined workshop with our second project Digital Escape Room and guest lecturer presented brain and memory strategies. Participants observed an English lesson with the CLIL method by local teacher Petra Šobak. Such lessons are a regular weekly model and the model includes digital technology and an active approach towards learning English on pre-primary level with learning by doing and methods of formative assessment. We organised workshops with mTiny robots, Beebots and computational thinking approach for English and STEAM. We showed lessons with tablets and our smart for topics like animations and interactive experiments, natural phenomena, shapes, the nature around us etc. In the partner kindergarten of Lendava, the teachers from Bistrica prepared a lesson with the usage of mTiny robots, also guest students from Serbia applied their English workshop. We combined approaches from 2 countries and inter-generational collaboration in an external partner organisation. We observed the local lesson in bilingual methods of teaching. We were part of an rare opportunity to exchange collaborative teaching methods involving 3 languages: Slovenian, English and Hungarian. In the LTT we conducted a series of STEAM based lessons prepared and carried out by all partners: Serbia prepared a lesson about volcanoes, centrifuges works and a magical stick challenge, Razkrižje a lesson about hygiene, Greece prepared a balloon experiment, Holland a lesson with candies and rainbows. Latvian prepared a lesson about plants with the aid of plants apps. All partners exchanged their ideas. We organized the professional event Youth into future, a open doors day for the wider public: Municipality, National Institution for Education, Universities, local economy, partners schools, representatives from science institutions and presented our work in the last years: competences of 21st century in the classroom, robotics and programming (Scratch, Microbit, Mindstorms), orientation in the nature, artificial intelligence in the meadows, digital and online escape rooms, innovative approaches in PE lessons etc. After the workshops, we organized a round table discussion with 10 speakers and altogether almost 200 participants.
Participation in the activities of the workshop was a benefit for the teachers and students involved in the project. We combined several activities by joining two international meetings and the conclusion of two national projects with the final event on Friday, where we opened the school doors to the public. This final event of our LTT activity was planned almost two years ago and shall serve as a joint good practice example of our, national and international, with the participation of more than 200 participants on that day and the demonstration of what we achieved in competences of the 21st century. We demonstrated some good practice examples in the field of integrating robotics, smart devices and computational thinking in the daily curriculum with Beebots, mTiny robots, smart screen and tablets as tool for a better understanding and development of STEAM skills. Joint lessons among local and guest teachers were a good practice example on international. Teachers planed their joint lessons and experiments in advance and the carried out activities were fun, interactive and very practical. It was an example of creativeness, critical thinking, multidisciplinary approach, language learning, development of logic and computational thinking skills and raising awareness about the nature and IT skills. We are certain it was a good example for out of the box thinking, like the workshop in Lendava with 3 languages. Benefit of the LTT activity was the exchanging of teaching models (CLIL, learning by doing, …). We are sure that the participants have obtained new motivation for their own research work with their students and will seek proof of that at the final event in Razkrižje at the final event of our project. Lastly, special benefit we see is combination of two projects, altogether ten countries, establishing new connections, obtaining end exchanging new ideas for the classroom and thus future upgrade and strengthening of our and our partners’ work.