environmental sustainability

Students teaching students how to make simple robots using trash.

We want to develop understanding among students and educational staff of the diversity of European cultures and languages and its value. All this goals will be accomplished building a website to document some cycling routes. This website will be useful to anyone interested in cycling and in the future it would be possible for other schools to join the web community and update the site with new cycling routes documentation. We would like to cooperate with people from other countries on the theme of sustainable development, that for its importance and complexity can’t be limited and faced at national level. Through the participation in the European cooperation we hope to promote cycling among young people, and, through the dissemination of the documentation produced, to raise the interest of
local communities on the importance of planning and designing cycle paths.
We want to involve students, teachers and scholastic communities in the development of products that are not limited to educational fields, but that cross the boundaries of scholastic and national areas to be available to everyone in the European Union. We think that working together on common and real problems is the best way to know and meet different cultures and scholastic systems.
Students will have a central role in all activities. They will have to plan the cycling route, gathering information on flora, fauna, climate, historical and artistic points of interest in the region, try it and describe it with special attention to critical passages, and get all the photographic documentation.
They will be responsible for the translation of all provided documentation into English and for the updating of the website.
They will evaluate documentation provided by students of partner schools by trying the described routes, during the scheduled exchanges. They present and discuss their results in international groups during the meetings and online conferences.

‘Do you sort your waste for recycling?’ was the fi rst question pupils at Secondary School Isidra de Guzmán asked their peers in a school survey. No one said ‘yes’ and 81% said ‘no’. This gave the class a sense of the grandeur of the task before them as they embarked on their communication campaign to make their peers more energy-aware. What they also found out was that half of those surveyed did have some understanding of the importance of water conservation, the need for this seeming more obvious and connected to their daily lives. When it came to energy conservation the majority “did not believe their behaviour to be important”.
The team concluded that the pupils at their school ‘know how to do it, but do not feel the need to do it’. Communications stemmed from there and after defi ning their messages and developing their strategy, the class began organising lively workshops, interesting exhibitions, contests, panels, a fun digital game and an informative website. They also joined external campaigns such as ‘Lights for Learning’ and ‘Earth Hour’, worked their Facebook contacts and championed programmes for the recycling of old equipment and clothes.
An empowering part of the project for the class was a visit to the local city hall where they attended a session on how to deliver workshops. The class learned about adapting their message to their audience and as a result, dressed up as mother nature for a set of “rucksack days” with younger pupils at the school. Lack of funding sometimes made implementation a challenge, but they managed to find solutions. For example, a great idea for an energy awareness photo exhibitionproved too expensive to produce so they did it virtually.
It is a campaign of raising awareness based on the own curriculum and the educational basic competitions, which it departs from the own experience of the pupils and in which they have all the protagonism. Workshops, exhibitions, contests, panels and cartels, creation of didactic materials, games for digital slate, videoes, graffitis, wikis, glosters, photographic virtual exhibitions, digital books and a length etc. They have been some of the activities and materials realized for this campaign, always from the playful thing, from the own language of the juvenile culture and innovative use of technology for the education.

Students from Italy, Greece and Hungary explore their own and each other’s countries, and then the whole world, as seen through the food that is eaten in the different places. Their journey is a virtual one, but the exchange of experiences is real, with regular meetings via Skype, and a blog http://secondagineuropa.blogspot.it/ a TwinSpace http://twinspace.etwinning.net/1291/home and the EXPO2015 community http://www.togetherinexpo2015.it/ as meeting points. In their journey through the world, students find out that the food of a country can tell us a lot about its natural environment, history, economy and even religion. The project, which was born out of the urge to find an alternative to the traditional book in Geography teaching, soon developed into something more: Geography learned not by reading a book or watching a documentary, but by meeting and making friends with peers from abroad. Geography not as a list of data about a country but as something alive, told by those who live in those countries. The partners in the project were three, but the EXPO2015 website gave us the opportunity to meet students from all over the world. The blog SecondaGiNeuropa got more than 11.000 visits in a bunch of months, and the students published around 400 articles. We tried out some simple exercises of flipped classroom: students had to work in groups to present an aspect of a chosen country via food, choosing an ICT tool from a list given by the teacher: the tool-testing had to be performed at home, the realization of the product and the publishing in the blog or TwinSpace at school, in a given time. All of the teams (first national, then international teams) managed to complete the tasks, boosting their creativity (thus their learning) in the process. The involved classes registered a dramatic increase in basic competences in Geography (in attachment, the graphics). It was a very successful project in terms of development of students’ competences via the use of ICT.

Climate for Children represents a concept which combines 3 strategies: 1) Bringing the new technology in the educational system; 2) organizing the wave of lot of new information offered by the world organizations – Open Data Initiatives; 3) involving the children in the climate change awareness process. It is a project that aims to mobilize children from early ages to social responsibility and enables teachers to enrich their lessons using the latest technology. The solution is a set of multimedia interactive presentations and games for interactive boards in classrooms. Interactive boards provide rich learning environment that integrates with traditional classroom layouts and collective activities. They boost creativity, encourage collaboration, and allow moving away from teacher-centric to a more personalized constructive learning.
The initial idea about the project was born as part of an assignment in the course Educational software. The presentations in Climate for Children use different sets of open data from the World Bank (http://goo.gl/Kx8cc6) and the Human Development Reports’ (http://goo.gl/dWPBeb) databases making the learning process more interesting. World Organizations around the world provide free access to a variety of raw data that give important information related to the UNDP Millennium Development Goals. Using the embedded codes, the students can interact with the presentations, finding data for a specific country and using these presentations to discover how they can contribute to solve a particular problem. This concept brings students closer to the problems that the world is facing nowadays, raise the awareness of the children about the problems defined in Millennium Development Goals and encourage the teachers to use the opened data from different sets of the World Organizations to stimulate the children. The implementation of this project is supported by specific grants and by the facilities that the university provides.