CONTEXT- SpaceD project is our way to investigate space, to discover ways for investment into a better, healthier and safer world.Teachers will train students to work for a united Space in Europe. Space is a force for the digital era; space inspires, motivates children, who explore innovative practices of working with space programmes, focusing on teamwork, combining efficiency with knowledge. OBJECTIVES- to promote teaching and learning of STEM competences, skills, including data collection, visualization, analysis; to improve younger generation’s awareness of Earth's climate; to use space related themes to enhance our pupils’ literacy in STEM-related subjects; to raise awareness of career prospects for the future space explorers, astronauts and researchers that will work together in 20 years time; to make teaching and learning of STEM subjects more attractive, accessible; to bring STEM subjects within pupils' reach; to use ESA/ESERO space-related STEM classroom resources; to develop new data, real-life scientific methodology; to share best practices, to foster interest in space, science and technology among European student community, providing educators, students opportunities to participate in space learning activities (discussions with astronauts and cosmonauts). NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 10 coordinating teachers, from each school- 1 teacher for every department in the school ( each curriculum subject will be represented in our activities); 50% of total number of students(10-16 year old) in each school, participating to workshops; parents, local community. Our project will create better school–community relationships; will achieve sustainable impact among specialists in education; will persuade them to change curriculum( all syllabuses should consist of innovative practices, essential for these digital children).ACTIVITIES: contests, workshops ( space rocket/ International Space Station/ robot / Solar System Planet Model ); activities (Bionic Hand, Astro- Food Workshop, Space poetry& story-telling Club, Space Photography Exhibition, Climate Detectives Community); Space Week, space bazaar to present products; Erasmus Space room. METHODOLOGY : inquiry-based, project-based learning skills; students will apply scientific concepts, maths skills, critical thinking, research, foreign languages, literacy, arts&craft design to achieve project products. Innovation is the main tool to achieve partnership among students. They will be involved in group work, games, peer-learning, problem solving, debate, presentations. Doing these activities, they remain focused and learn actively. They learn differently, are engaged emotionally, learn faster (learning requires problem-solving, critical thinking). Games involve investigation, risk-taking, experimentation, curiosity, problem-solving, creativity. Presentations are engaging, empowering. Receiving instant feedback helps students stay on track and improve participation. Game based learning is competitive. Healthy competition among students motivates them. Field trip activities help students learn by mapping information taught in class to real-life examples, creating connections.DESCRIPTION OF RESULTS : We will share our best practices, innovative learning tools, we will promote open education across countries. Our products will assure visibility for our methods worldwide. Participants will improve their speaking, writing skills in English. Students will share with their parents, friends what they have gained. They will develop capacity of taking initiatives, responsibility for project activities, self-confidence, learning to understand and to be understood. Workshops on space will assure social inclusion for disadvantaged students. Stakeholders will improve school curriculum, with tools, methods that encourage creativity, innovation. This project materials will support teaching activities for neighbouring and rural schools.LONGER TERM BENEFITS: European dimension for partner schools; new strategies to help students learn better, becoming responsible European citizens. Local communities will develop European identity. International dissemination on Etwinning will lead to our external recognition. Other teachers, students will benefit from our activities on space. We will encourage wider participation in Erasmus+ Programme; will develop new partnerships by taking part to space competitions; will deliver project products to local, regional, national and European decision-makers, media, to spread our techniques to other interested schools in Europe. Impact will be measured through updates, visits to project website, meetings with stakeholders; participants involved in workshops, seminars, peer reviews; visibility in social media, website attractiveness; participation in public events. We will monitor links with space institutes and transnational partners; transfer of know-how information on Etwinning and School Education Gateway.

The new communication paradigm, generated by media convergence, has no National borders.
For that reason, it is momentous to promote the creation of synergies among different countries and actors and interchange of practices to develop media literacy.Our project aims at promoting media literacy and critical thinking skills which raise awareness of media manipulation and providing the participants with the knowledge and power for efficient and safe use of media outlets.To solve the media literacy problems, the coordinator (Lithuania) decided to collaborate with 5 schools from Portugal,Croatia,Turkey,Spain,Italy, which attach importance to media literacy and conducting studies to tackle with the problem to enable pupils to become more conscious media consumers having the ability of critically thinking. All partner schools have some initiatives at local level but there are few cases where a local activity has been extended to all the nations or outside national borders. By dint of this project, media literacy promoting activities will have European stardom, which will increase their visibility and effectiveness.The target audience of the project is students, teachers, parents, local people, neighbouring schools, local authorities, media itself, policy makers. In total 72 teachers who constantly strive for their own professional development and 144 students aged between 14-17 will participate in 6LTTs.Each LTT will serve the purposes of attaining the project goals.Thanks to 1st LTT in Lithuania, participants will enhance critical thinking and media literacy to strengthen democracy and counter manipulation, propaganda and disinformation as cited in Erasmus+ program guide and will tell the difference between professional news-gathering and amateur rumour-mongering. The 2nd LTT in Portugal will enable participants to cope with the manipulations by ads and to be judicious consumers. The 3rd LTTA in Italy will enable the participants to access and interpret the right information thanks to their increasing experience in media literacy.That will facilitate the acceptance of cultural difference, diminish racist behavior and develop intercultural skills.The 4th LTT in Croatia will teach them to differentiate different media outlets.In virtue of 5th LTT in Spain, participants will develop skills in media production and subsequently develop their initiatives.Moreover, rather than just being external spectators and information recipients, they will become content makers and learn to reach info through different means. The 6th LTT in Turkey will enable students to become conscious of different forms of online hate speech and their reasons and effects.These objectives will be achieved through outdoor/indoor learning-teaching, scaffolding, problem solving, CLIL, ICT,Inquiry based and Cooperative Learning, Textual and Visual Analyses, Think-pair-share-technique all of which are based on interactive teaching and student-centered methodologies.By the virtues of LTTAs and mentioned techniques and methodologies, we aim at attaining the following concrete results-6 issues of e magazines about LTTAs-1 e-book covering all LTTs-Digital and ceramic version of project logo-An action plan about media literacy-A podcast named digital footprint to enable students to be safe and conscious on the internet-A podcast about offering tips to protect users from cyber bullying and hate speech-Brochures about fake news-News reports and newspaper about LTTs-Slogans, mottos and bookmarks about media literacy-Seminars about raising media literacy for pupils, teachers and parents-Participants will act independently and replicate what they learnt further in their settings; thus they will be multipliers who can contribute to raising media literacy in their their school, region, country, through EuropeIn the long run, participants’ skills for accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating media will increase and in virtue of our project, the participants will raise their literacy, life and learning skills which are caterpillars of 21st century education. Since students and teachers will use ICT in some project outputs, their digital skills will improve. In the long run, we will go on organizing a “media literacy” week every year.The concrete results will be available on TwinSpace, YouTube Channel, project's websites, social media platforms for everyone interested in media literacy.The e-book will provide the sustainability of our project as well as being a resource from which all our stakeholders will benefit.Moreover, our project with its results will present implications to curriculum designer to integrate media literacy into their national curriculum.Each partner school will prepare an action plan in which we will organize activities, seminars, meetings, etc.to train students on media literacy.Thus, we will ensure that action plan’s being our organizational culture, which is the hardest evidence of our project’s benefits being long lasting

"Values in Education: Teens in Action!"" (VETA) is a two year project in which schools from eight countries of the European Union( Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden) who had established a professional connection over the Internet or/and through previous personal contact, are involved.About 250 students from Years 9, 11 and 12 and 25 teachers have taken part in this challenging project working together to reach the same goals: to improve the students’ level of English as a lingua franca within the EU, to foster positive democratic values to prepare them for an active citizenship in their adult life whithin a common Europe, to increase the students' skills and level of competence in ICT, and Visual Literacy, and to promote cooperative work.Since our project aims at students between 15 and 18, a very critical age, we have considered it would be highly relevant and positive to work on twelve macro topics connected with values, these being: consumerism, poverty and solidarity, Internet safety, gender quality, interculturality, European citizenship, road safety, tolerance and respect, human rights, violence and hate, health and addictions and environmental issues. We have reached the project’s aims by means of watching, subtitling and discussing short films and movies based on these values, and above all by creating, both locally and internationally, student-produced short movies, documentaries or PSA .Therefore, we have provided students with the chance to express their own views and to be heard, and at the same time they have improved their foreign languages skills and competences in ICT and Visual Literacy, thus becoming the central elements of the teaching- learning process.As one of the key aims of the project is to foster cooperation amongst students and teachers, our methodology has been active, cooperative as opposed to competitive, and agreed through general consensus. Students have been encouraged to improve their social and autonomy competences by cooperating in transnational teams. Furthermore, teaching guides have been collaboratively designed to foster the reutilization of the audio-visual outputs in worldwide classes.Regarding the activities, in order to guarantee coordination, three general transnational meetings, plus a bilateral one in Germany for the two countries involved in the Long-term-study-mobility of pupils, have been held: the first one in Spain, and the other two in Norway and in Sweden, with the objective of planning the agenda, discussing key issues and monitoring and assessing the activities. We have developed eight local activities in which students have been be asked to accomplish specific tasks on eight of the mentioned values. Finally there have been two short term exchange of students per year, in Spain and Bulgaria in 2015,and in Finland and Lithuania in 2016, to work together and create internationally team –produced outputs on the four remaining values.Not only the students participating in this project have benefited from it, but also the teaching staff from the participating institutions, the whole educational communities of the partner schools, Local Communities and other European teachers, students and educational communities in general.Through the production of VETA DVD, we intend to transcend the scope of our schools and share our products and results not only locally but worldwide through the Internet, thus fostering the usage of English as a Lingua Franca, together with Spanish and German, raising awareness on EU values and promoting youngsters active citizenship and participation.We expect this project to have a pervading impact on our schools and local communities. Its expected outputs have been devised to be sustainable open access resources, which will remain accessible on the Internet, and which may be easily exploited by other schools and educational associations and institutions all over the world."