Loading
Our project aimed at improving oral presentation skills of the students and preparing them to the real world, helping them to collect, inquire, organize and construct information, creating TED like talks, enhancing team work, preparing them to deliver a good speech and helping them become active and autonomous learners as well as offering our students a chance to explore different facets of cultural diversity in the modern Europe. All partner schools except for the Czech partner had already cooperated with each other in European projects before. We knew we could work efficiently in this project because of our former collaboration and experiences. In terms of exploring the key concepts of the project, we motivated our students to develop leadership skills thanks to the TED like speeches which gave them the opportunity to find out the topics they really wanted to talk about. This way we were able to involve a great number of students overcoming their fears of public speaking. Each partner school established a TED-Ed Club led by the students, where they periodically met and shared knowledge, exchanged ideas and prepared their TED-Like Talks which they later on performed either at their schools or during mobilities. Through these meetings and discussions, the students were able to share, compare, change and modify their ideas with the help of the others. We have observed that such intense interaction helped them have a better understanding of others and other cultures. According to their answers to the initial and final questionnaire about `fears of giving a public talk`, we can report that students have become much more confident with public speaking and aware of the importance and the need of such a skill in today’s world as the leaders of the future. We prepared satisfaction questionnaires after each LTTA (Latvia, Italy and Germany) and the students provided answers showing that they gained deeper consciousness of multiculturalism and European identity, common European values and breaking down prejudices. They also found the interaction with their peers from various countries very valuable as they were able to brainstorm, compare their views, discover new ways to deal with topics and improve their social and language skills. We truly believe that these genuine encounters helped them to gain more emotional competence and intercultural sensitivity. Intercultural competence supported by the dialogical approach was one of the main objectives of the project that was fully reached during each students’ mobility and this helped them to understand each other’s views and backgrounds better. Thanks especially to the TED city game held in Italy, and the Model United Nations (MUN) conference held in Germany, we watched them learn and widen their perspectives by sharing their views, working in multicultural teams, and learning from each other. We happily observed fruitful and friendly conversations, true tolerance and mutual understanding among students where the feelings of strangeness and otherness were not felt at all.We had 3 LTTA meetings where the students performed their TED-Like Talks and worked on other activities of the meetings, as well as attending international TED-Ed lessons prepared by the teachers of the project’s partner schools. After each meeting, teachers were also asked to fill in a feedback form which confirmed the answers given by the students. It confirmed that all the partners worked in harmony, sharing and caring and that the project was really improving and smoothly giving the expected results and outcomes. We had three Transnational Project Meetings (TPMs), the first of which took place in Turkey, where we participated in a training on `How to use TED Talks in the classrooms and prepare TED-Ed lessons`. The second TPM was held in Portugal at the end of the first year, where we were able to evaluate the activities of the project, plan the future steps, and write the interim report. The last TPM was organized in the Czech Republic at which we shared the final results of the project and worked on the final report. After each mobility a newsletter was prepared by the host schools which not only included the activities held during the meeting, but also showed the progress of the project.We met the objectives described in the application form carefully, which required a lot of planning, preparation and cooperation among partners, not only during the meetings, but throughout the whole project. We can declare that there was good, swift and constant communication, which gave enough support and encouragement to each partner and we felt like a huge family:-) We supported the students not only during regular school lessons but also in the TED-Ed Club activities organized mostly after school. During these activities students had the opportunity to collect ideas and materials for videos and presentations required for the mobilities, as well as watch popular TED Talks and prepare their own speeches
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<div id="oa_widget"></div>');
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="https://beta.openaire.eu/index.php?option=com_openaire&view=widget&format=raw&projectId=erasmusplus_::ec8357c6f57cd29121e975642b3dc7d9&type=result"></script>');
-->
</script>