special needs education

Project Location

Country: 
Belgium
City: 
Mechelen

Organization

Organization Name: 
Sint-Janshof VZW De Ranken
Organization Type: 
School

Website

http://new-twinspace.etwinning.net/web/p84658

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Project Type

Education up to 15 years

Project Description

Description Frase (max. 500 characters): 

Students with and without special needs of 4 different countries show eachother in what they are an expert by using 4 themes: computer, gardening, art and cooking.

Project Summary (max. 2000 characters): 

The project ‘Experts academy’ has a student oriented as well as a school oriented intention. With the students we started from the strengths of students with special needs. By working with different themes we showed each other what we are good in. Each partner country has chosen a theme in which the school has a lot of expertise.
For the work with the students we always had the same structure. One of the partners prepared a task for the others according to the theme in which he is an expert. The students took pictures from the result as well as the work process. They sent the images with instructions to the other partners and they had to try to do the same exercise and achieve a good result. We have put together the results of the partners in different ways. In this way we all became an expert in the themes of the others.
In the block of each team we met in the ‘expert-country’. We also took some of our students to the meetings. During the meetings the students worked together and tried to reach a common goal by working on a common result.
On teacher level we have built expertise about integration in education. There for we visited the different partner countries to exchange the ideas of inclusion, integration. The partners worked on a common publication in which we describe the way of working in the different countries together with some reflections, impressions and thoughts.
We had a lot of different activities and different themes to involve as many students as possible.

How long has your project been running?

2012-08-30 22:00:00

Objectives and Innovative Aspects

PUPILS:
-To be open minded towards European cultures:
By exchanging working methods and experiences we want to open their minds for European cultures. To achieve this we worked with audiovisual tools.
-To integrate students in mainstream schools and local community:
For future life it is important that students are included in their social environment. To achieve this we have let them work in mixed ability groups.
-To recognize strengths and increase self-esteem:
We wanted to make them aware that they have good qualities and others can learn from them. To achieve this they became an expert on a topic.
-To increase ICT-skills:
ICT can help students to gain autonomy. To achieve this we teached them how to use different ICT-tools by sharing knowledge between students.

TEACHERS:
-To share strategies about how special needs students and mainstream students can interact and cooperate:
sharing our experience can help to improve our pedagogical skills about inclusion. To achieve this we shared methodologies with our partners.
-To compare and adopt new pedagogical approaches according to integration of students in society:
To achieve this we exchanged expertise by observing strategies and methodologies in other countries.
-Improve ICT, language and communication skills:
To achieve this we organised some training sessions on different communication and ICT-tools.
-To value the importance of working together to achieve a common goal:
We believe that knowledge building in teamwork requires some complex processes (discussing, reflecting). To achieve this we organised a possibility to collaborate in our own school and with school partners.

Results

Describe the results achieved by your project How do you measure (parameters) these. (max. 2000 characters): 
PUPILS: - increased language skills: students made a presentation in English, students tried to communicate in different languages and had nog fear about it. - increased ICT-skills: students use more and new ICT-tools now. - increased social skills and self-confidence: There is no more fear to communicate with people from abroad. - increased motivation: working with a European project is very motivating for the students. STAFF: - increased organisational skills: We are more trained in organising in a structured way larger activities - increased language skills: More and more colleagues don't care about having students from abroad in their class for a workshop in English - increased ICT-skills: We learned to know some new ICT-tools and we are using them in our school. - increased motivation: By travelling with students, more colleagues are open for European projects now.
How many users interact with your project monthly and what are the preferred forms of interaction? (max. 500 characters): 

Most of the time the project coordinators of the 4 countries interact by e-mail.
We also had 6 project meetings with teachers and students travelling to the partner countries.

Sustainability

What is the full duration of your project (from beginning to end)?: 
From 1 to 3 years
What is the approximate total budget for your project (in Euro)?: 
From 10.001 to 30.000 Euro
What is the source of funding for your project?: 
Fee
Specify: 
Secondary school for special needs education
Is your project economically self sufficient now?: 
No
Since when?: 
2014-11-29 23:00:00

Transferability

Has your project been replicated/adapted elsewhere?: 
No
What lessons can others learn from your project? (max. 1500 characters): 

We were scared to travel with our special needs students because of the language. We learned that there is nog reason for fear, because especially our students are very good in communicating by trial and error. They always found a way to understand eachother and ask what they wanted to know.
Others can learn out of the information we collected about inclusion in the different partner schools. The activities and workshops we organised with our students are perfectly usable by others. The step-by-step schemes and descriptions of the tasks are on the Twinspace and can be used.

Are you available to help others to start or work on similar projects?: 
Yes

Background Information

Barriers and Solutions (max. 1000 characters): 
It was not easy to find common dates for our meetings. Every school has his own agenda and holidays are not always together. Also the weather is sometimes important. We tried to plan everything very long in advance and had a calendar for almost the whole schoolyear everytime.
Future plans and wish list (max. 750 characters): 
At this moment our project is going to his end. The funding of the national agencies ended in june 2014. During the rest of 2014 we finished some paperwork and worked together to apply our project for some labels and prices. We want to get the projet under attention because it was very important for our schools.
art gardening special needs education COMPUTER European exchange cooking
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