Teachers from around Europe are invited on a yearly base to participate in this project. The project encourages students to learn the English language and helps portray the importance of a universal language.
The project can act as a bridge from grammar into the spoken word
Bringing schools and the subjects together is paramount to progress in helping maintain peace for future generation in a vastly changing world. One of the main objectives within the murals project is to promote peace within understanding.
By understanding other cultures we also understand ourselves better.
In this life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.
As the world is becoming more and more global and we coexist on a more global level we can’t just think there’s only one right way of living or that any one is valid. The need for coexistence makes the coexistence of cultures and beliefs necessary. In order to not make such mistakes, the best thing we can do is get to know other cultures, while also getting to know our own.
This is exactly what the murals project sets out to archive
The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.
This project helps students to develop different skills : improve the teaching and learning of the English language; increase the use of ICT; improve the relationships and the knowledge among schools and cultural backgrounds in Europe; develop the main competencies though different activities: Treatment of information and Digital competence, Linguistic Communicative competence, Knowledge and interaction, citizenship, Cultural and Artistic competencies, Autonomy and personal initiative competence.
Students can show and increase their creativity while they create the murals, write short texts or produce different works (PowerPoint /prezi presentations, short videos and blog entries). Most of the works are produced in English and Visual Education Lessons, but they include contents of other subjects such as sciences, geography, history, music and citizenship in cooperation with the school library teams.
The idea of creating murals and short texts to accompany the murals as explanations is deeply based on cooperative work. The founding school Elizabeth gave the partners all the necessary instructions and guidelines to participate in the project, so that the participant teachers and students could work together and at their own rhythms/ pace, in order to develop the items and main subjects chosen .Students worked in groups to create the murals. Throughout the project ideas and suggestions are exchanged between the participant teachers on the net (the project continues to grow in numbers and ideas every year.)
Each participant school was free to use the software/ ICT tools teachers and students considered most suitable to achieve the aims of the project, in order to enhance the production of the murals and as a way to show their art works, on the website. On the twin space students can also learn about other web 2.0 tools that their partners have selected to show their murals (for instance photo puzzle, photo decorator, photo Peach. Voki, glogster, BlogSpot, Word Press, among others). Lousã team worked on prezi, PowerPoint, Photo peach, Movie maker, Microsoft auto collage etc. Creativity can be shown and developed while students produce the murals, write messages and short articles and create presentations for the twin space and blog.
..see more in the attachment