Our project is entitled: “Our differences make us rich” and aims at the realization of a multimedia manifesto written by our students, young Europeans, for tomorrow’s Europe.This project springs from a desire to strengthen the feeling of belonging to the European community in a context where many member countries tend to withdraw into themselves. We will wonder how the handicap, gender equality, multiculturalism and newcomers (or migrants) are being tackled with and represented in our European society. This question will be dealt with in three parts:- Explain (who are we); explain the themes (what is ...)- Questioning and analysis of each themes (what is at stakes?)- Proposing solutions to the issues identified.The main objectives are: opening doors to Europe for students facing economic and social obstacles, the inclusion of pupils with special needs, ensuring that our students acquire linguistic, citizen and civic skills and exchanging teaching practices among teachers. These objectives will have a positive impact on all pupils and teachers directly and indirectly involved in the project through innovative practices, project pedagogy and cross-disciplinary. Parents of students will be positively affected by the project. Through dissemination, our schools will make the results of the project visible and associate their image with that of Europe.This project, for pupils between 11 and 15 years old, will take place over two years, from September 2019 to June 2021 and will gather the Jules Lagneau College (France), Gymnasio Komotinis (Greece), Instituto Comprensivo G. Pierluigi (Italy), Vilniaus Balsiu progimnazija (Lithuania) and Scoala gimnaziala Nicolae Titulescu (Romania) around the theme of differences. The language of exchange and work is French and the disciplines involved in the project are: languages (French, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Romanian), history, science, mathematics and art.According to the school context and its specific characteristics, each school is responsible for a theme:- France: the handicap- Greece: multiculturalism- Italy: common cultural heritage- Lithuania: equality between girls and boys- Romania: migrationsFive learning activities are planned:- 12/2019: in France- 03/2020: Romania- 05/2020: Greece- 11/2020: Italy- 05/2021: LithuaniaDuring each learning activity, each school will involve 6-7 students and 2 accompanying adults, totaling 24-28 students and 8 accompanying adults per learning activity.Before the week of learning, students will work on the subject (explanation, investigation). During the week, they will present their results, exchange among themselves and make common proposals. They will visit a place related to the theme, they will be initiated into the language of the country hosting the learning week and discover other cultures and educational systems.All productions will be posted on the eTwinning platform and will constitute the multimedia manifesto written by our young European pupils and a link between secondary school and high school.

CONTEXTWe are 5 European schools which want to join our efforts to increase the students’ knowledge and interest in subjects related to the cultural heritage of our countries – Geography, History. Moreover, in a world touched by globalisation in which individuals have a tendency to overlook their own national heritage, we need our students to go back to their own roots by knowing the customs and traditions which have been passed on from generation to generation. We are of the opinion that if you don’t know your roots, you don’t know your foundation and if you don’t know your foundation, you can never thrive. Therefore, we want to cultivate our students’ patriotic feelings, making them look back to their past and their origins, while at the same time opening their horizons to other cultures and their specificities. PARTICIPANTSStudents – the target group is made up of approximately 1000 students aged 11-14, 100 of them having special education needs. 150-200 of them will be selected as members of the work group (minimum 30 / country, but the number may vary according to the size of the target group up to 40). They will be at the core of our project, will be involved in the activities of preparation before the exchanges, 100 of them will participate in the activities during exchanges, will disseminate the information to the other members of the target group after the exchanges. Accompanying teachers – 2 teachers/country/exchange. One of them will be the coordinator, while the other one will be a History/Geography/Literature/Arts/IT teacherOBJECTIVESThe main purpose of the project is to increase the cultural and intercultural awareness of all the actors involved in its implementation. However, being specifically targeted to students, we have set the following objectives for them:OS1. To increase the cultural awareness of at least 80% of students, making them more knowledgeable about the history, geography, literature, customs, traditions, dances, musicOS2. To increase intercultural awareness and competence of all the students, making them more knowledgeable about the other European countries, history, geography, literature, customs, traditions, dances, music.OS3 To improve students’ ICT skills by having them use mobile applications and online tools for presentations, activities, evaluation, creation of outputsOS4 To improve students’ transferrable skills – communication, research and analysis, team work, adaptability, organisationOS5 To improve students’ motivation for learning and self-confidenceAt the level of the institutions, our objectives are:1.To improve the European dimension and international cooperation2.To motivate teachers3.To improve the communication and cooperation among all school actorsMAIN ACTIVITIESWe plan to organize 5 exchanges, each dedicated and hosted by each partner:1. C1 - The Italian heritage – hosted by Italy in February 20202. C2 – The Lithuanian Heritage – hosted by LT in May 20203. C3 – The Romanian Heritage – October 20204. C4 – The Turkish Heritage – March 20215. C5 – The Polish Heritage – June 2021RESULTSTangible results include: presentations created by students (30), workshop materials, online brochures (5), the final output “The European heritage”, guest students’ travel journals (80), the eTwinning space, eTwinning forum, photo albums (5), Europass mobility documents (112), certificates of attendance (112) initial and final evaluation forms, mobility documents (agenda, methodology, questionnaires, evaluation forms) etc. IMPACTThe institutions will benefit from the good practices acquired and transferred through the participation of students and teachers in the exchanges. They will promote intercultural learning and will open to new models that will benefit the students in the medium and long run, too.We will develop the European dimension of the school and will be better prepared to manage projects under Erasmus+, both the experienced schools and the less experienced ones. This project will lay the foundation for future cooperation among schools through eTwinning and Erasmus+

"Looking back ""Zoom in"" was a project with a vast spectrum. On one hand it focussed on technology and on modern techniques and on the other hand it embedded art and speaking skills and fostered the development of the youth. Furthermore with this project the young people got an insight in the partner countries customs and traditions that is why it also has a big impact on the European level. The pupils got acquainted with new learning methods and new technology which they can use later on in their lives. They learned basic and advanced techniques of photography and graphic design. Taking pictures on the phones had a different meaning when the task was to ""focus on the good of something"".By focussing on Antonello da Messina, Constanin Brâncusi, Antanas Sutkus, Ebru Painting and on Friedensreich Hundertwasser the pupils learned to somehow slip into the role of the artists and try to see and interpret the world around them like the artist would have done.The fact that the school in Italy was an Art school was very inspiring and challenging. The pupils enjoyed working on the artistic interpretations as well as on the contributions for the exhibitions. We had photo competitions and the best pictures were chosen for our wall calender and were also uploaded on our website. We also filmed the working process throughout the project and uploaded the videos on our website.One goal that was developped withing the 2nd half of the project was the idea to create a common video in the style of Gary Barlo's song ""Sing"". Singing the song together with the pupils from the partner schools was an interesting experience. Communicating through singing this song brought the children closer to each other. It was a good ""background"" sound for our project that accompanied us in the second year. The ""Sing"" video was cut and edited by our pupils and is published on our website.Regarding the dissemination students, teachers, local community and national authorities and European partners were involved. We had local papers that mentioned our project and local authorities that invited us and wanted get to know our project. The main dissemination, however, was through our project's website. We were also active on e-twinning.Most pupils who went abroad already had contact with each other through socail media. Many of them are now still friends and keep in touch through writing various media. Since English was the language of communition they also trained their language skills while widening their horizon on culture, art, photography, new technologiess, the European Union and democracy. For many students, the Erasmus project opened up a completely new perspective of the world, as many had never travelled abroad before."

“Our heritage” states the EU official website, “has a big role to play in building the future of Europe.” As primary school educators, we could not agree more with this statement. Yet, teaching young learners about their heritage can often be an unproductive endeavour. Cultural heritage is all around us, but fragmented across disciplines and curricula. Celebrating multiculturalism is a laudable goal, but it is yet to be translated into comprehensive pedagogies. Young learners’ engagement with heritage is essential in building the future of Europe, but any interaction other than respectful preservation is often considered hubristic. Motivated by these observable needs and inspired by the discourse of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, this project aimed to develop new and innovative pedagogies for teaching and learning about cultural heritage. Our objectives have been to make cultural heritage an appealing subject for both teachers and learners, to approach it creatively through digital technologies, to consider it in relation to the increasingly multicultural composition of our classrooms. Underpinning all these objectives is an understanding of cultural heritage as a dynamic and participatory field of learning, one that warrants not only the preservation of the past, but also our interaction with it in the present, for the purpose of building a better future. As the slogan for the European Year of Cultural Heritage succinctly puts it, “Our heritage: where the past meets the future.” We appropriated this slogan into the title “Cultural Heritage: Cherishing the Past, Building the Future” for a 22-month project involving six primary schools from Cyprus, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Spain. We envisaged the project as an all-encompassing experience for our schools, involving different groups of participants. To ensure that all children took part, an array of activities had been planned, including three transnational pupil exchanges. Teachers oversaw the implementation of pupil activities, designed and delivered innovative teaching on the project’s topic, and took part in two transnational training activities. Parents and the wider community participated in outreach activities and events targeted at the project’s dissemination. Methodologically, activities were designed to foster participatory and experiential learning. They all had a parallel implementation stage, an interactive stage between pupils at different schools, and a follow-up stage that connects them to other activities and/or dissemination events. Digital technology played a key role, both in developing innovative approaches to teaching cultural heritage and in facilitating learners’ participatory engagement with it. To this end, the project also included activities targeted at increasing both teachers’ and pupils’ digital fluency. The project was designed to yield sustainable results that would last beyond the project’s timeframe and have an impact beyond our six-school partnership. In terms of teaching, the key result was innovative methods for addressing questions of cultural heritage in primary education. Teachers also gained transferable digital skills, especially in the areas of multimedia output and interactive digital lessons. These improvements did not load existing curricula with new material, but renegotiated our approach to existing material and its incorporation into formal and informal lessons. Concrete output with long-term benefits for our schools includes new lesson plans, templates, and games in adjustable digital formats. To broaden the project’s impact, this output has also been made freely available on TwinSpace and open education databases. Our pupils did not only gain factual knowledge about the different facets of cultural heritage (tangible, intangible, natural, and digital), but, more pressingly, they actively participated in its development and gained a deeper appreciation of multiculturalism. In addition, they improved their digital literacy skills. The project’s concrete results comprise all the material and digital outputs of pupil activities, including a calendar of European traditions, a digital museum of project artefacts and a code of multiculturalist conduct. All these results and many more have been digitally shared and disseminated. Looking to the future, the project’s benefits can only increase as European classrooms become more multicultural and more reliant on technology. Apart from their intrinsic value for education, these benefits become more relevant, more topical, more exigent in the context of a project that teaches the future generation of European citizens to cherish their cultural heritage and work together in building a better future.

The project STEPS to Tolerance for European Pupils is the result of the initiative of 6 schools in different countries (Romania, Spain, Lithuania, Greece, Italy and Portugal) to create a tolerant Europe that promotes equality of chances, equity, civic responsibility and respect for diversity. The strategic partnership is relevant to the theme of tolerance and understanding in Europe. The idea of this project has come from the awareness that there is one world and it’s different and the acceptance of diversity, social, ethnic, religious and cultural differences is a necessity for all of us.School partners show similarities in the field they apply the project:-activities to promote tolerance, to combat discrimination and aggression, to integrate disadvantaged groups into the educational act,-priorities of similar institutional development (social inclusion, equality, fight against xenophobia, racism, violence, promotion of democratic values, increasing the motivation of students to learn, encouraging tolerance unto others, promoting intercultural dialogue and innovative education)- common learning needsThe aim of this partnership is to promote inclusion in diversity and fundamental values (tolerance, freedom, non-discrimination) in order to ensure high quality education for all students, creating conscious and sustainable civic attitudes in students towards the phenomenon of discrimination and social exclusion so that they become more tolerant, more responsible and better people.The specific objectives of the project are: to increase the awareness of students and teachers by 50% on the prevention and combating of discrimination by the end of the 2019-2020 school year, the transfer and implementation of innovative practices for a number of at least 300 teachers in order to ensure a stable and positive learning environment, to promote equal opportunities and personal development for each student, to educate at least 500 students in support of tolerance and respect for racial, religious diversity, for Europe’s culture and traditions, for people with disabilities, by 30 August 2020, the formation of interpersonal and social competences that will help to improve the relations between students, students-teachers, students-teachers-parents, the cultivation of some civic skills for at least 500 students to promote the principles and rules of European democracy and bringing up a social and responsible behavior, the 80% reduction of the aggressions in the school environment by the end of the project and the creation of positive alternatives for conflict resolution in order to improve the educational process and the effective cooperation of the factors involved in education, the improvement of digital competences and communication in English, as a necessity of an always in change global society, supporting students to become adults of an inclusive multicultural society. The project activities include 4 mobilities with 12-13 years old students, 2 learning activities for teachers.The methodology includes: 10 virtual meetings between school partners for communication, permanent monitoring of indicators and results, elaboration of questionnaires, surveys, technical and financial reports on implementation of activities, didactic materials, dissemination campaigns, elaboration of management documents, workshops.The partners aim to develop through this project skills and abilities but also new approaches at the institutional level.Among the students, the project will generate benefits:-efficient communication-work in teams-reducing aggressive behaviors and any kind of discrimination-promoting cooperation, understanding, respect for oneself and others regardless of religion, culture, ethnicity, nationality-adopting positive behaviors that will allow them to reintegrate into society much easier.Among the teachers, activities facilitate:-developing the ability to integrate students at risk of marginalization and ensuring high quality education-using and adapting new interactive methods in activities with students during classes-developing relationship skills in achieving a tolerant, peaceful, learning-friendly school environment.At school level, the project contributes to:- increasing the capacity of organizations to cooperate at European level-developing new approaches that respond to new challenges in the field of education in order to increase the community's and students' interest in the school's educational offer.Final Products:-logo-the anthem of the project -a compared study to the notion of tolerance, understanding, cooperation-a good practice guide to combat intolerance in the languages of the countries participating in the project- mini-dictionary with common phrases- case studies on social exclusion and measures to solve them- dissemination brochures, newsletters- calendar with the traditions of each country- the site of the project- photo albums, videos