SiLab project aims at developing some of the most valued skills in the labour market such as innovation, creative thinking and digital skills. This will be achieved though the implementation of the concept of i-lab to school environment; the creation of i-labs at schools and the development of teachers’ capacity to integrate innovation in daily school practice.
An i-lab (innovation laboratory), a concept pretty popular in big companies, is an inspirational innovative facility designed to transport users from their everyday environments into an extraordinary space encouraging creative and innovative thinking as well as collaborative work towards problem solving through a mix of on-purpose environment, technology and facilitation techniques. The strength of the i-Lab is its proven and unique approach to innovative and creative thinking, which lends itself to a wide variety of applications.
During the project our students will have the opportunity to visit the partner schools in Portugal and Croatia, where they will discuss with their peers about their ideas and their progress on the project. The i-Lab will be designed and created by the students, who must think innovatively and out of the box in order to develop such a place. It is estimated that the i-Lab will be ready by the end of 2020.
Apart from the i-Lab that will be created in the school, this project will create an on-line software application to be used in the i-Lab and when ready, in the i-Lab will take place some pilot sessions in order to evaluate the project products and introduce the rest of the students the idea of i-Lab.
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The objective of this project is to empower youth to act as agents of change for building a Europe of sustainable development and equality by enhancing their critical-voting literacy that includes: (a) media and news literacy; (b) socio-emotional literacy, and (c) social-justice literacy. To do so, this project draws upon the strategies of critical literacy and experiential learning, by using new technologies, and innovative methodologies, such as collaborative role play and simulations, problem-based learning, critical-incidents analysis, and virtual communities of learning and practice.
The project reinforces the development and implementation of successful initiatives in critical-voting education. It will contribute in counteracting the detrimental consequences of populism to the values that define us as Europeans, and mainly sustainable equality, respect for human rights and freedoms, tolerance, pluralism and non-discrimination. Finally, it will raise youth’s voices and active involvement in decision-making through innovative methodologies.
The main result of this project will be a methodological Toolkit of ‘Resources and Activities’ for enhancing education for critical-voting literacy, which will be developed according to a comparative analysis of both teachers’ and youth’s needs in the participating countries. This Toolkit will be tested through workshops carried out with teachers and youth aged 14-18. As the project also envisages the development of teachers’ and youth’s competences to work accordingly, a Teacher’s Handbook and a Youth’s Handbook will be produced. In the end of the project a transnational joint-staff training event will be carried out in Greece to train teachers to use the project outcomes.
The European Commission calls for systematic initiatives to re-engage youth in politics – based on their own understanding and voices. This project addresses the urgent challenge of young students increasing disengagement in politics.
“Political Game Changers” invite students to co-create attractive and practically useful guidance to secondary schools on how to prevent disinterest and foster engagement in politics, democracy and values. The guidance will be developed through real-life/time open schooling and will be based on practical experience.
To achieve its goals this project takes into account three different methodologies, the didactic, the co-creation and the subjective engagement. A school guide to engagement of young students in politics and democracy, including virtual scenarios along with a study of the reasons for the lack of interest in politics and democracy among the young generations will be created. Also, the student teams will create a video movie explaining their engagement in the politics detective missions and how they along the project developed an alternative understanding of and language for politics, democracy and EU values.
“Leaving no one behind” is the central aspiration that underlines the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. To achieve an inclusive society it is necessary to take into account the need of a sustainable approach to our development. In this scenario, not only youth are recognized by the 2030 agenda as “critical agents of change”, but they possess the energy, creativity and motivation to challenge current unsustainable models and envision new approaches and new sustainable solutions.
The “TAKE ACTION” project aims to increase social and civic competences of European youth by transferring and adapting an effective teaching methodology, the “Action Civics” curriculum, and improving the capabilities of teaching institutions in providing their students with tools and knowledge to foster their active participation in the society.
Our school together with the other two involved high school will test the curriculum and assess the impact both on teachers and students. An e-learning course targeted to teachers will be developed to allow the transferability of the curriculum and will be freely available to be implemented, updated and share. The pilot implementation and the evaluation activities planned in the project will be aimed at producing a report which will include detailed data on the impact of the curriculum on the involved students and recommendations for policy-makers, public institutions and authorities.
Our school is actively involved in many projects from all the spectrum of education. Such a project is the “ACTIvE”, which aims to promote social inclusion starting with school education through a holistic approach.
Through this project, Platon is cooperating with educational institutions from Europe in order to support special education. More specifically, ACTIvE aims to provide educators working in school contexts with innovative Continuous Professional Development opportunities to deal with ASD students. It is a project that promotes social inclusion through talent development and creates synergies at local and European level to develop innovative practices for inclusive Europe with a bottom-up approach.
ACTIvE, directly and indirectly, affects many people. Apart from educators working in school context that have an opportunity to enhance their competences in relation to autism this project benefits the students, their families and the local communities in general.
By the end of the project, a “curriculum to become JOB COACH” will have been developed, tailor made on the training needs of educators and psychologists working in a school context with ASD students (age 15-18). The other main result of the project will be the development of a new online learning environment, enriched with training materials for educators, a collaborative space for the users (namely, the community of practice) and an Info Desk, which will serve as a contact point among platform users and project partners.
Discrimination against group of people because of their gender or their sexual orientation is a major problem that still exists in Europe according to research conducted in 2018.
There is clearly much room for improvement regarding gender and affective-sexual diversity and this project aims to offer an integral response. The main objective is to raise the levels of awareness of this subject and reducing those of discrimination and conflict due to gender or affective-sexual orientation.
There is a comprehensive action plan divided in phases throughout the 3 years of the project where all the research and results will be collected and analyzed. The next stage is the dissemination of the results that will provide the local educational communities and authorities with a solid plan on dealing with these issues. The ultimate goal of the project is to establish a “European Network of Discrimination-Free Schools” starting from inside the partnership of schools and organizations that work on this project.
It is to be hoped that the ultimate benefit will be an improvement in the levels of discrimination, conflict and bullying within schools as well as a greater awareness of gender diversity and affective sexual orientation. Similarly, we hope to spread inclusive values and improve the way in which those schools committed to the promotion of democratic values and an active and efficient citizenship approach diversity management
Play2Learn has as primary objective to produce approaches and tools to help teachers encourage kids to engage with programming and develop STEM related skills. It aims to achieve this not by increasing screen time but by encouraging hands on play through the creation of use of a do-it-yourself computer kit which bridges the online and offline worlds through Minecraft Pi games and Scratch/Python programmes which interact with electronics circuits.
Our partners are one more school, two ICT training centres, a network for the promotion of ICT-enabled E&T, a company offering bespoke software development services to governmental agencies and a company specialising in corporate training solutions and knowledge dissemination as well as several associate partners from the area of ICT-enabled E&T and schools.
This consortium will produce the results of the project which include the Play2Learn Kit comprising a do-it-yourself computer, peripherals and electronic circuits to be used with provided educational content, animated videos introducing the Play2Learn kit and its uses, educational content covering Minecraft Pi, Scratch, Physical computing, an educators guide including lesson plans, Learning Motivation Environment in all project languages delivering the Play2Learn content in the form of engaging online multimedia resources and the Play2Learn Academy virtual space with supporting infrastructure
These results will give teachers and trainers a complete package of elucidate findings regarding to ways of introducing children to programming and STEM through hands-on play. There will be created evidence-based policy and research recommendations for the use of educational play for teaching coding and STEM related subjects. Play2Learn is hoped to act as node of knowledge dissemination on how to engage children with programming and STEM and provide strategies for the adoption of educational hands-on play in the classroom
This is a project for preschool education that aims in capacity building of administrators and teachers of pre-/schools in several topics such as the EU projects; ECEC Framework; saving and support traditions in pre-primary level of education; social inclusion of children with disabilities and disadvantage background.
The project includes Transnational Peer Learning Workshop, activities including children presenting and promoting their own country cultural heritage, educational part with internal and external experts and more. All of these activities target in increasing the capacity of preschool staff that lead to general improvement of current ECEC process, rise children involvement in saving and promotion of their own cultural heritage, strengthening intercultural understanding, deeper understanding by parents of their role in upbringing, care and education of children, reinforcement of local public rhetoric about necessity of high quality ECEC system appropriated to EU framework and recommendations, close collaboration between participating organization, improvement of partnership relations.
This project addresses the urgent challenge of young Europeans’ increasing disengagement in politics. The project asks: how can open schooling in secondary schools contribute to engaging young people in politics, democracy and European values? Co-driven by young students themselves, the project will create innovative open schooling guidelines to secondary schools on how to organise engagement in political initiatives.
Young Europeans invites secondary students to co-create attractive and practically useful guidance to secondary schools on how to prevent disinterest, and foster engagement in politics, democracy and EU values. The guidance will be developed through a real-life project worked by our students and real-time open schooling and will therefore be based on practical experience of our students, not on theoretical assumptions. The students are asked to act as policy detectives on a problem they discover in their society and develop their ideas on how it should be faced through politics. During the project, our students will visit our partner schools in Vilafant, Spain, in Pasvalys, Lithuania and there will be a big student mobility in Poland, where the students will have the opportunity to discuss and share their thoughts on the project with theirs peers from other countries.
Based on students work this project will produce some results such as the guidebook, which is a radical school guide to engagement of young students in politics and democracy, including virtual scenarios. There will be also a study by the university partners of the project on the lack of interest in politics and democracy among young people. Another outcome will be the video movie in which student teams explain their engagement in the politics detective missions and how they, during the project, developed an alternative understanding of and language for politics, democracy and EU values. Finally, a policy paper of a reflection, based on project activities, on why Europe and the European Project are losing young people’s interest will be created.
This project belongs in a category of projects in which our school participates actively in the last years, the Open Schooling projects. The idea of open science schooling approaches is more practically implementable for schools and science teachers in secondary schools.
One of the major components in science learning innovation was: to be attractive to 21st century students, science and science learning should recover and rediscover the links to narrative and make efforts to communicate the learning in narrative forms. These links to narrative forms includes for example: adventure, science fiction, exploration, detective work, curiosity – and the ability to take action in such narrative worlds: narrative and epic agency.
The concept of this project is to integrate these narratives in the Commission’s learning policies such as “science with and for society” and “responsible science”, but also to integrate sharing the science engagement with the students’ families and with other citizens.
The results that will be produced based on the students’ work include a guidance collection for secondary schools and their science teachers on how to easily integrate the critical science detectives method in the science curricula, a joint video movie from all the students participating in the project explain how they changed their negative attitudes towards science through the critical science missions, a theoretical paper discussing state of the art of Open Science Schooling from the point of view of lessons learned in the Critical Science Detectives project and a policy paper trying to identify the key challenges to science learning innovation, based on positive and negative experience from the Critical Science Detectives project.
European Commission and the OECD as well as leading research communities agree that one of the biggest challenges to 21st century education is to engage and re-engage young student along their teenage years in science learning. Family-based OSS is a project which addresses the need to boost the interest in and retention of students in STEAM subjects.
One powerful way to practice to (re)engage young students in science learning connected to society demands is to include families and community in open real-life activities, engaging students and their families in science in the local and virtual communities. Families, especially parents, have a crucial role at influencing students’ engagement towards science learning.
This project has 3 main objectives: 1) Encouraging families to become real partners in school life and activities through participatory design; 2) Co-creating ’science everywhere’ activities alongside teachers, students and families to support responsible science education; 3) Supporting the deployment of immersive Joint Science Missions involving the community as a whole so that schools become agents of community well-being.
All project elements are directed towards producing such practically useful and attractive guidance to secondary schools and science teachers through participatory design with schools and families. The success of such initiatives is totally depending on the quality of the capacity building and empowerment of science teachers, schools and the surrounding school communities.
The project will yield 4 product outcomes including the School Guide to Family-Based Open Science Schooling, a students’ video on how they developed new images and engagement to science, a study analysis on how family based open science schooling helps (re)engage young students in science, and policy recommendation on challenges to open science schooling innovation and re-thinking science education.
The project aims to develop a training course on “Diverse coding”, enabling people with specific disabilities: Adults (Age 18-60 years) with hearing disorders to increase their digital skills and programming, with a methodology that applies European recommendations to validate non-formal and informal learning to facilitate recognition and transfer of results.
The coding offers students with learning disabilities “real-world skills”, some industry experts said, “transforms them into digital culture producers”. It also interests them and makes them more available and “inclined to socialize”, building the important skills of group work and socialization, often lacking in the disabled student population of learning.
The project aims to develop an innovative coding training program for learners with disabilities, particularly deaf people who naturally tend to have ease in coding as they are doing it every day with lip reading and decoding and deciphering every noise and sound with the aim of encouraging the development of their special digital skills for adults and, in turn, their transversal skills, in particular problem solving.
“Diversamente coding” also aims at transparency and recognition of skills and qualifications; application of the European recommendations to validate non-formal and informal learning for experts in diversily coding with the improvement of their digital skills and programming in an informal and formal learning environment. Another goal is to increase skills in vocational training and adults, helping to improve support for adults with disabilities across the full spectrum of their digital skills, by intervening in improving social inclusion, as stated in the Europe 2020 objectives and implement the European recommendations methodology to validate non-formal and informal learning for adult education in the fields of social assistance.
The main objective of this project is to empower children to act as agents of change for building a child-friendly Europe in the sense that is socially-inclusive by celebrating and cherishing the diversity of our cultural heritage. To do so, it encompasses the children-inspiring-children approach, while using new technologies, and innovative and creative methodologies, such as collaborative art-making, intercultural online pedagogy, and collaborative story-telling and poetry. Another important objective of this project is to promote children’s and teachers’ training to enhance their competences in becoming the facilitators of the children-inspiring-children approach so as to meet the first objective of the project.
The project aims to promote social inclusion by taking advantage of the potential that cultural heritage gives us to celebrate and cherish our diversity. Raise children’s voices and active involvement in education through an innovative methodology drawing upon the children-inspiring-children approach.
The EUROCHANGE project will produce a methodological tool for the Children-inspiring-children approach according to a comparative analysis that will result from both teachers’ and children’s needs analyses in the participating countries, but also on the basis of the state-of-the art analysis in each participating country.
According to this methodological tool, the consortium will produce a Toolkit of Resources and Activities that will promote the objective of the project. This Toolkit will be tested through workshops carried out with teachers and children 9-12 and then finalized, localized and translated in the national languages. As the project also envisages the development of teachers’ and children’s competences to work accordingly, a Teacher’s Handbook and a Children’s Handbook will be also produce.