"Teaching and training professionals has changed over the course of years. The importance of new technologies for educational practices is unquestionable and considerable amounts of digital tools are offered, presented and tested in schools every year. However, teachers and students seldom have the privilege to reflect over the effectiveness and learning impact of these tools. Teachers, pupils and school staff can easily find themselves as mere passive receivers in an always evolving world. Together with the constant and vast stream of digital solutions that teachers and pupils are exposed to, little or no pedagogical and didactic reflection follows. ""IT's the future"" is an international project which has as its main goal to deepen the expertise and knowledge of integrating new technologies into existing educational practices. The project aims to exchange practices for the implementation of new technologies in education. Hence, it aims to generate an arena where schools, teachers and pupils can apply new technologies in a critical and reflective way.The project is formed by a partnership of five European upper secondary schools (Belgium, England, Iceland, Norway and Spain) which are currently embarked in a full scale implementation of digital tools to their educational practices. Specific working areas are defined for the partners in the project. Heilig-Harthandelsinstituut Waregem, Belgium, will guide the partner schools into the exploration of ""gamification"" as a learning and teaching tool. Experience, expertise, and a thriving developer environment have determined the solvent background of this choice. Sykkylven vgs, from Norway will contribute with expertise on the pedagogical background of the most used digital tools for education. Close links to external partners such as Norwegian Maritime Competence Center and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology will strengthen the synergies generated by the project even further. San Fermín Ikastola, from Navarra, Spain, will share its experience and knowledge utilizing digital tools for the teaching of core subjects like Language and Social Sciences. This Navarran school is currently part of a vanguard attempt (the EKI project) for the replacement of all traditional learning tools with digital ones. The St. Margarets school Bushey in England and Fjölbrautaskólinn í Breiðholti, in Iceland, will introduce free/open software solutions to the partner schools. Both institutes are in the middle of a full scale digitalization program and it will contribute with expertise in managing and implementing the necessary changes for it. ""IT's the Future"" is a project targeting pupils of 15-18 years old and their teachers and members of staff of the schools involved. Many of the project activities will take place during the transnational school visits. However, the project is conceived to be a part of the normal academic year as well, ensuring a constant flow of outcomes through the whole project. In other words, the project will be integrated as a significant part of the schools' main study plan and thus the technological innovations and digital solutions and tools will be tested and integrated into the project and the curriculum to be used hands-on. In order to maximize the synergies generated by the school partnership, several external partners will be included to the project. The external partners of this project are sound developers and stakeholders within the field of digital technology and education. Moreover, in order to further strengthen and widen the insights of the theme, senior academic researchers are also integrated to several activities like seminars and workshops.Acknowledging the needs and challenges of our time, the methodology of the project will be based on an entrepreneurial approach. This project will open up an arena where five European schools will have the opportunity to meet, discuss, and reflect over the didactic tools that are changing the very core of the educational practices of our time. This way of thinking is taken into consideration when designing activities, defining concrete goals, and evaluating its corresponding outcomes. Thus, goals and outcomes of this project will deem the needs of a target group, whereas a clear strategy to communicate and evaluate its impact will be defined. Furthermore, the project has a strong focus on transverse skills and intents to cover and incorporate several school subjects to all activities and outcomes."

We addressed issues and challenges the 21st century will have to face when it comes to matters of ecology, overpopulation, conflicts between countries, personal relationships, social media and education in a digitalised world. We put focus on the European added value and really stepped in and took matters in hands. We researched the topics at hand so we could in a second stadium really step into action and produced some very concrete outcomes (in the third and last stage). In the first step we addressed climate change (like desertification, flooding, water shortage, extreme weather, food production, diseases, the environment) and put the focus on sustainability (in the domains of migration, resources, green energy, transport, new technologies, sustainable tourism). Our key focus lay in food and food production (up- and recycling, GM foods), the human impact on the planet (responsibility, population, overconsumption, pollution, waste management, food waste) and the relationships between humans as such (mental and physical health, media, distribution of wealth, conflicts, (inter)national organisations, digitalisation and job loss). Our second step was to take matters in our own hands and provide the students with some hand-on experiences. Here the key focus of every partner school has proven to be of the utmost importance: we experienced water and waste management in a large city like Budapest, along with the issues tourism (in e.g.the flooding around the Danube) brings. In Estonia we visited entrepreneurial companies and universities to work with us on the topic of digitalisation and social media in education and in Belgium we brought experts in to help us with these issues and with the concept of promoting a healthy working and studying environment that is set for the 21st century. We furthermore optimised our school sustainability by measuring school waste, water, electricity… consumption. The German school had their focus on environmental issues. In Scotland and Germany, the focus also was on cooking together through the means of local and sustainable products. Our outcomes were a cooking contest, digital stories, a recipe book (“The How to save the Earth Cookbook”), our project website and newsletters to disseminate our results among the students involved, but also to the broader school and the local town. Our participants were all 15-18 years old, but we also addressed the entire school community and as such reached an audience in between 8 and 18 year old as well as several members of staff. We claim to have been quite successful to change the life habits of all participants and schools involved and as thus created a more sustainable lifestyle that will benefit a healthy and creative working environment in the future.

Students have changed in the way they learn in recent times, their social skills dramatically transformed with the development of the internet. We want to broaden the student’s scope by breaking out of the classroom and putting them in contact with different social groups like kindergarten and primary school pupils, elderly people and university students. We also want to raise their social awareness and their contribution to the broader society. We want them rise above the digital skills they have and to put them to use on a higher level. We furthermore want to deal with the challenges both students & teachers experience in a society that is changing rapidly. By establishing this project, we will have students from Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Hungary and Scotland from different abilities, backgrounds and experiences (rural vs. city, countries with different teaching methods, school systems, history, different ways of coping with learning disorders) meet and work together in an international context. Working across borders in mixed groups will be quintessential to this project, as its very aim is to step away from classic teaching to a more project-oriented open space in which the teacher serves as a guide to help out the transnational groups in tackling different subjects and topics directly linked to the outcome of the project. We want to address issues & challenges the 21st century poses when it comes to matters of social inclusion, racism and ongoing changes in society. We want to put focus on the European added value & really step in and take matters in hands. In a society that puts the stress on individual success, we need to rediscover the social aspect & the importance of responsible citizenship. Every country was chosen because of its relevance in the project and so students will have to travel to the different schools involved to investigate on site. We want the project to evolve around the topic of inclusion & diversity, following 3 key phases: research, action and outputs. Our main objectives are respect, solidarity, equal opportunities, diversity and responsible citizenship. As the first step, we want to address and dig into social skills (mutual understanding and acceptance, empathy, skills involving how to prevent and solve social conflicts) through integrating ethnic minorities into society. We want to understand which challenges different groups (e.g. refugees, ethnic minorities, kids, elderly) face in society, and what could be done to help resolve these challenges on the national level, local government level and school level. We also aim to find good examples of how social inclusion has already had a positive outcome. For the second phase (action), we want to put the focus on hands-on-experiences (e.g. visiting the eastern part of Estonia where 90% of the population is of Russian origin or a German refugee accommodation centre, teaching seminars to different social layers in society like kindergarten & primary school kids or the elderly), training new teaching methods and digital tools to the students involved so they can work with them and use them or involving the students in entrepreneurial and project-based workshops to train them for further education and later work life. In the third phase we want to come up with very concrete outputs to address the topics that were under investigation. As our project’s focus involves social skills, social inclusion and integration on the one hand, as well as ICT, new technologies and digital competences on the other hand, we want to work out educational material and workshops that can be used even after the end of the 2-year-project. This all will link with the set priorities of open education and innovative practices in a digital era and promoting the acquisition of skills and competences, as this will prove to be highly relevant for everyone’s future.