LTT1: Teaching STEM in the 21st century classrooms
Our first Ltt meeting was held in Almada/Portugal from 5th-9th march 2018. Escola Secondaria Emidio Navarro hosted teachers and educators from partner countries. Turkey, Romania, Sweden and Greece joined as 4 participants and Italy joined as 2 due to some administration reasons.
The main idea of the meeting was “Teaching Stem in the 21st Century Classrooms” .For this reason our working agenda planned rigorously that we had chance to learn What is Stem from its expert and we tried to find answers questions as:
-how can we use Stem education approach effectively in our classrooms?
-what are the new techniques and technologies for Stem education?
-what are the features of 21st century students , what do youth need?
-what does our future need?
We observed real problems for real solution, as well. With the territory walks, we figured out the reasons of building the structures such as bridges, aqueducts, etc. The task of the week was finding solution to the traffic problem for Lisbon by using STEAM disciplines. To carry out this task, we have been divided into the groups, groups worked whole week collaboratively and presented their product to other groups at the end of the week.
At the first day of meeting, when we went to Escola Secondaria Emidio Navarro , the meeting room was prepared for us with all the materials we need during our working sessions. Mr. Rui Baltazar the Portuguese Project coordinator welcomed us warmly and presented the whole programme. Mrs. Sibel Saygın, the coordinator of the project made opening speech and shared the dissemination templates to all partners which will be used during the project lifetime. Before the sessions started, the director of the Escola Secondaria Emidio Navarro greeted kindly to all the participants and gave medal and memory book of their school.
“What is Stem?” session started with Rui Baltazar’s speech and Mr. Wim Simoes presentation. Wim Simoes is International Senior Officer at Eekhout Academy where is a national and international in-service training (IST) organization for schools, center for adult education, school management, principals, teachers, educators and school governors, based in Flanders, Belgium. Thanks to his contributions, we could clearly understood Europe’s situation in terms of Stem education. The presentation was made by using online connection tool. During the presentation the participants were asked about Stem and Stem education in their countries, each topic in the presentation began with the main question that the all the participants had to answer and continued with detail explanation.
Origami Workshop was held by Ms.Ana Mota who is Math teacher at Agrupamento de Escolas Emídio Navarro and coordinator of the tutor teachers group. With the presentation and the activities during this session, all the participants learnt about origami engineering and how it is used for innovation and creativity in many disciplines. Furthermore the presenter emphasized the significance of “Designing Thinking” for Stem education.
Drone and Robot in the classroom was presented by Ms. Fernanda Ledesma who is President of the Portuguese Association of IT teachers, new softwares and technologies were introduced to use robots and drones as educational purposes. During the workshop, we could have chance to practice softwares, robots and drones and learnt how to write code for the drones by using Tynker programme. Fernanda Ledesma showed what kind of technologies and techniques they use in the 21st century classrooms in terms of Stem education.
Before the Portugal LTT project coordinator and the Portuguese coordinator discussed on the effective learning, teaching and training meeting , we strongly agreed on adding Art into the programme , in this issue Mauro Gentile who is the a multimedia producer, coach, social educator, musician and computer technician helped us combining Art with technology. At the end of the week we had our LTT film which was released on our social media as a dissemination activity.
Moreover, the school and cultural visits were added value of Erasmus Plus Programme. So we had chance to benchmark the school education system of Portugal and our own countries while we were visiting the school and having chat with school teachers. We have delayed the education systems presentations of other countries to the 2nd LTT in Sweden due to use time logically.
The visits of Da Vinci Museum ,pillars of the 25th April Bridge, Aqueduto das Águas Livres gave ideas for our group task, all along the visits, we gave importance to use outdoor activities as educational purpose and discussed how can teachers use amuseum or structure to teach by Using STEAM disciplines. As a result of these, all group worked hard and prepared their masterpiece experiencing learning by doing.
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To say goodbye to us, Our Portuguese friends organized a cultural night with their famous traditional Fado music. While listening Fado artists , we could feel their feelings deeply and understood the meaning of the rythms even though we didn’t know enough Portuguse language.