Our school is the coordinating partner for this three year Erasmus+ project involving ten schools and three universities. The three Irish schools involved, Sacred Heart SNS, Killinarden, St Mark’s SNS, Springfield and Lissigiveen NS, Killarney all have gained Digital Schools of Distinction status. The three partners from Denmark Søhusskolen, Provstegårdskolen and Højby Skole are all based in the city of Odense, with one of the schools involved in a national project in Denmark – IDDL (Inclusion and differentiated teaching in digital educational environment). Three Italian schools, IC “G. Toniolo” based in Pisa which has close links to the University of Pisa (one of the university partners) and two schools Scuola “Caduti di Cefalonia” and IC “Niccolò Tommaseo” from Turin one of which is a partner in the 2.0 Italian project for enhancing the use of digital technologies in schools. The final school partner is Kriivarin koulu school in Paimio, Finland. The other two universities are NUIM, Maynooth, Froebel College of Education and University College Lillebaelt, Denmark. The project aims to support the development and implementation of innovative ICT usage in primary schools, involving national and transnational cooperation, peer learning and the exchange of experiences using a variety of hardware devices, including interactive whiteboards, desktop and laptop computers, tablet computers and hand-held devices,. The university partners will produce a best practise manual of ICT usage in schools which will be complemented by video tutorials showcasing good practice of the actual use of such technologies in classrooms and schools participating in this project. These videos and other resources which will be made available on the project website which the University of Pisa is developing, hosting and maintaining. Currently there are only a small number of such video tutorials in the Technologies section of the project website but it is expected that the number of such videos will grow substantially in the next school year.
There are a number of classroom based activities for the pupils in the ten schools such as e-twinning projects between classes in the partner schools, an international cookery book project, a Christmas Cards exchange project, a mascot project which will be used as a stimulus and channel for pupils to record and share cultural and generally interesting events, places and activities which take place over the course of the project. One week will be allocated each academic year for whole school activities to take place based on an agreed themes, such as Friendship, Internet Safety etc. A selection of these activities can be viewed online on the project website by following the link by clicking on the image.
Staff in each of the partner organisations have the opportunity to travel and experience other educational systems at first hand through visiting classrooms at each of the three transnational meetings each year for the duration of the project. A one day training event, organised by the university partners is organised on topics such as internet safety, film and multimedia, enabling technologies – ICT and special needs, internet technologies – Google apps for Education, Cloud Computing and ICT outside of school – Online Learning, Authentic / Personalised Learning etc.