"""My Way, Your Way, Our Shared Cultural Identities"" is an innovative inter-cultural communication project involving schools from Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Its rationale is based on the understanding that mobility, an integral part of our increasingly globalized world, presents challenges arising from the cultural differences that are an intrinsic part of people's complex identities. Therefore, knowledge and awareness of how culture impacts communication is essential in effective cross- cultural communication. The project has sought to a) develop students' understandings of the interrelated nature of language, culture and communication; b) develop students' skills to spot, reflect and deal with culture bumps; c) enhance students' confidence when encountering unfamiliar environment; d) develop students' presentation skills; e) train students to conduct interviews to extract relevant information, analyse it, and present it in both oral and written form; f) develop students' curiosity towards different cultures and languages;g) to prepare students for study and work in inter-cultural settings;h) hone students' IT skills through utilizing innovative applications;i) develop a broader view of what European identity means to foster responsible citizenship skills;g) enrich teachers' classroom instruction methods and schools' curricula.This project has built on the rich experience all schools have with mobility to design a learning resource for training students to take stock of their inter-cultural experiences and develop understandings of the interrelated nature of language, culture and communication. The resource pack contains critical incidents and videos based on the experiences of the participants from the project.The methodology used to design the resource pack has used the culture assimilator, a cognitive approach in inter-cultural training based on the meaning attribution method. During the preparation stage, participants were trained through simulation games and inter-cultural training activities aiming to develop their sensitivity and awareness of identity formation, empathy, ethnocentrism, values, stereotypes, the dynamic and emergent nature of culture and strategies to decenter and re-frame in order to negotiate meanings. This learning resource has been beneficial on two levels - through the process of its designing and the outcome itself.As the participants experienced cultural variation, they gained knowledge about what, how and why cultures do their shared practices; through the culture-contrast approach and reflective practices they gained insights into the value systems of both their own and other cultures; their insights helped them develop skills of successful communication in diverse settings and resulted in the production of learning resources for use by all who are interested in intercultural education. The interactive nature of the resources have had a double effect - developing students' IT skills and making the materials appealing to a wide on-line audience. In addition, both teachers and students have learnt to deal with culture by adopting the culture assimilator approach, which have enriched their classroom practices and the school curricula in several subjects. Outcomes :1) ""Cultural Detectives in Action""- an OER pack for analyzing culturally diverse behavior, which consists of: -20 critical incidents (text, video, art, photography);- teachers' notes.The resources have recorded and enacted misunderstandings based on cultural differences drawn from students' authentic experiences. The resources are accompanied by teacher's notes explaining the rationale, objectives and procedure to assist educators who will be interested in implementing these in their practice. The critical incidents and the teachers' notes are available online and on paper to all participating schools to integrate in all classes where culture is an issue. Also, they are a convenient tool to prepare students who are to embark on a cultural exchange. Their online status makes them accessible to an audience outside our immediate school communities and ensures its wider impact. Some of the critical incidents have been translated into Bulgarian and Italian to make them accessible to teachers who do not speak English. 2) Intellectual Output: ""CulturAll” - this is an interactive resource whose purpose is to raise awareness of cultural facts about our own countries through the intercultural journeys the main characters from each country take and the challenges they encounter. This is a game created by using a web application and it practices intercultural learning in a fun and innovative way."

OptEEmAL aims to develop an Optimised Energy Efficient Design Platform for refurbishment at district level, which will deliver an optimised, integrated and systemic design based on an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) approach for building and district retrofitting projects, reducing time delivery and uncertainties, resulting in improved solutions when compared to business-as-usual practices. This main objective will be deployed through the following key objectives: 1. Development of a holistic and effective services platform for District Energy Efficient Retrofitting Design integrating interoperable modules and tools able to provide services for diagnosis, scenarios generation (according to stakeholders priorities), energy/ cost/ environment/ social evaluation, scenarios optimisation and data export. 2. Reinforcement of the presence of all involved stakeholders through an Integrated Project Delivery approach that will allow them being articulated through a collaborative and value-based process to deliver high-quality outcomes. 3. Development of an integrated ontology-based District Data Model that will contain key information in the fields of energy, comfort, environment (LCA), economic, social wellbeing and urban morphology. 4. Development of an Energy Conservation Measures catalogue (ECM) including technical, operational, maintenance and cost information giving valuable and consistent outputs to the design and district operation and maintenance stages. 5. Development of a bio-inspired optimization module based on Evolutionary computing with the aim to automate the decision making process to obtain the optimal design for an energy efficient retrofitting plan at district level. 6. Development of external connections of the OptEEmAL Platform to external entities (i.e. existing tools enabling the calculation of indicators to generate and optimise the retrofitting scenarios) 7. Strong disseminations, training, exploitation and market deployment strategies.

The COOL DH project will innovate, demonstrate, evaluate and disseminate technological solutions needed to exploit and utilise sources of very low-grade "waste" heat for heating of energy efficient buildings via Low Temperature District Heating (LTDH) and show how the District Heating (DH) systems can be more resource efficient and more energy efficient. The demonstration covers both new developments and stepwise transition of existing areas with district heating and energy retrofitting of buildings. The COOL DH consortium consists of the utilities and municipalities of the two cities Lund (SE) and Høje-Taastrup (DK) and leading DH energy specialists as well as leading industrial manufacturers. COOL DH will: - Innovate, design and build cooling and heat recovery process systems, enabling heat recovery to a local low- temperature district heating grid. They will mainly be driven by renewables. Design work will start in 2017 and heat recovery will start in 2019. - Design and build a low-temperature district heating grid with non-conventional pipe materials and testing of new innovative pipe components that will become new products introduced as a result of COOL DH. - Innovate and design suitable innovative heating systems and controls inside buildings that combine LTDH with distributed integration of local produced renewable energy on the buildings. Erection of new buildings in Lund will start in 2018 and will continue throughout the time of this project, while LTDH in Høje-Taastrup mainly will be for existing buildings being refurbished including modification of the heating system. - Develop viable business models and new pricing systems, that ensures a good (low) return temperature and provide the building companies with maximum flexibility regarding the choice of heating systems. - Demonstrate a full system with all needed components suitable for ultra-low DH temperatures (40 oC) incl. demonstration of systems for heating of DHW without risk of legionella.