ECB

Industry projects:

Industry-school collaborations

Outcomes:

In this discussion teachers have talked what they expect from industry-school collaborations. They have mentioned long term relationship with study visits, specialists coming to school, material, which is up-to-date, and working experiences for the students.

Teachers find collaboration between school and industries very important, it raises interest in STEM subjects, gives pupils knowledge of certain professions and give them valuable enthusiasm for future studies. Teachers find it already necessary for primary level, when pupils start to choose their subjects. Some teachers find it difficult to find co-operative industry and sometimes industries have strict rules about school visits, so they can only watch, not take part.

Also industries benefit from school collaboration. They can engage students early and get their future workers and raise the interest in certain occupations.

Communication:

In this discussion teachers were telling about their experiences on school-industry collaboration. It seems quite a many schools have established a co-operation. They have visited local industries and get quite many industries getting involved with schools. Also curriculum recommends industry visits in some countries. Communication used in these projects has been school web-pages, where they can also promote industries. Some projects have been presented in European Forum. Also communication between individuals is important.

European Projects

This part of the community of practice focused on the dissemination strategies and the exploitation of results related to European projects. 

Participants of this CoP gave the following examples about teaching resources that are provided by EU projects:

1) Comenius projects at school - teachers use the created teaching material later in their classes.

2) InGenious project

3) Lots of good resources in Scientix www. scientix.eu

4) Mangahigh maths games

5) Nanoyou,Nanochannels

6) eQNET network, eTwinning

7) PROFILES http://www.profiles-project.eu/ 

8) Intel Teach

9) www.didactic.ro

10) project DESIRE

11) spice.eun.org 

12) http://plus.maths.org/content/

How to communicate the existence and results of EU projects to colleagues. Exploitation of results:

1) Face-to-face meetings of teachers, involving other colleagues from their school and other schools; school conferences

2) Web pages of projects, blogs – be online!

3) Scientix portal, subscribe to their newsletter so that you can be informed of new projects and events without searching for anything specific in the website.

4) Local public institution in charge of teachers' CPD organizes meetings, has a website for uploading and sharing their ideas and materials.

5) Websites of Lifelong Learning programme

6) National portals where teachers can find information about EU projects in own national language.

7) Use the social media to spread the European projects awareness among teachers. 

8) The productions (technical systems like robots) can be shown in exhibitions and in a website

These are the qualities of attractive projects and results: 

1) The project is related to the curriculum. 

2) The project is easy to manage.

3) It motivates students, is connected with their interests and real life.

4) It helps the teacher to achieve the goals of the curriculum. 

5) When the project is over partnership continues with the students and teachers who worked together in the project.

Problems teachers have noticed concerning European projects: 

1) Not enough IT labs at school to use all the good teaching resources.

2) Disseminating the results of projects depends mostly on the initiative of the teachers that participate on the projects

3) Poor knowledge of English doesn't allow to use or disseminate international project results

4) Teachers have too much work, many teachers don't want to take up a project. Being a leading person in a project is very time-consuming.

5) There are not enough national or local portals where teachers can get to know which projects on science education are going on in Europe.

6) Involving more teachers requires an effort not just from teachers but also from institutions and people in charge of coordinating projects, allocating budgets, identifying priorities and planning teachers' training.

7) The time that a teacher needs for looking for the materials for a class is an enormous waist of resources.

Websites recommended:

Examples of teachers' projects and local resources:

http://elweb2.wordpress.com/, http://moodle.unitus.it/moodle/course/view.php?id=92, http://2009elweb.wordpress.com/about/pm-in-bulgaria-sept-%E2%80%9809/

http://europeanclubportugal.wordpress.com/, http://entrenosnanosalingua.blogspot.pt/, https://sites.google.com/site/internationalteamset

http://www.travellingmoomin.blogspot.fi/ , http://www.infovek.sk/predmety/matem/index.php, http://www.matika.sk/index1.htm, 

http://www.ucmeradi.sk/, www.outlab.ie, http://knockaclariggpsmathsgeog.blogspot.ie, http://prezi.com/ovqpygth2uiv/an-realt-gorm-eu/ 

www.anrealtgorm.wordpress.com, http://www.eurov.org/index.php?lang=english, 

Suggestions by teachers

1) To raise teachers' interest in European projects ask a member of the parliament or some other official to come to school and speak about European values.

2) A good search engine for the materials and the possibility of having them all together on the same place would improve the use of very good materials by many teachers around Europe.

School projects:

Communicating school project results

Social media:

In this discussion teachers were telling the social media they have been using for communicating school projects. Facebook, School´s Webpage, Special platforms made for teachers, Moodle, eTwinning, Blogs, Twitter, local newspaper and television was used. There were also many examples of School´s Webpages and links to project Blogs.

Success stories:

In this discussion teachers were telling about their projects. Here one can find many ideas. Science day exhibition, presentations, conferences, international day of chemistry, STEM projects, Science fair, students research and experiment, water projects, fieldtrips and how the budget varies in different countries. 

Research:

This part of the community of practice focused on research and academic projects, and on how teachers expect research results to be communicated to them.

Research results can be communicated in different ways: 

1) text-based (e.g. project reports, articles in academic or professional journals, etc.),

2) web-based (e.g. projects' websites or other portals on the Internet, social networks, newsletters sent by e-mail, etc.),

3) face-to-face (e.g. conferences, workshops, etc.).

Participats of this CoP gave the following examples about how they get information:

1) At annual conferences of teachers' associations some scientists are invited to inform teachers about their latest research.

2) I teach pupils 10 years of age and sometimes we just search the net or newspapers for new findings and research-results, they get fascinated about it.

3) In Portugal, the Portuguese Physics Society and the Portuguese Chemistry Society have news letters and organize some very interesting seminars and conferences where results of research programs are disseminated among scientists and teachers.

4) Life science centres organize meetings with scientists.

5) Science museums disseminate knowledge to teachers and students.

6) Teachers' societies have newsletters, websites and journals with science research updates, pedagogical advises and success stories of teachers.

7) A web site for all science teachers supported by the Weizmann institute of Science where teachers can find a lot of scientific and pedagogical materials ready to use. Teachers can also ask questions in the forumes and get answers.

8) Science centres to introduce science (Heureka, AHHAA etc). 

9) Special radio programmes (e.g. Laboratory in Estonia) where scientists are invited to speak about their scientific research. There are also science news from all over the world.

10) A journal Science Illustrated available in science classroom. This journal is easy to read and contains numerous short articles about latest scientific achievements.

11) Young scientists came to the class and told the students about their projects. The students saw that young people can do science and show them that science has relevance to daily life.

12) Teachers usually value research projects in STEM education specially if these projects produce teaching resources and materials that can be easily used in their science lessons.

13) Teachers do the STEM educational research themselves. Teaching experience helps in research field and research process helps understand teaching-learning process of STEM education better.

14) A good system of professional development plays the key role in mediating and stimulating the dissemination of research findings to teachers and their classroom. In the UK there is in-service teacher training provided by professional development leaders, who have knowledge and experience both in teaching, school curriculum and in research. Their job is to monitor the 'state of the art' in STEM education, including research findings, and then adapt and adjust them to the needs of a particular teaching community.

Problems teachers have noticed: 

1) The main limiting factor is time. Teachers would like to know more but they don't have enough time to read scientific journals and to search different databases for new information.

2) Web pages are good for disseminating the results. The biggest problem is that there must be researchers who are interested in disseminating their results.

3) Teachers don't know where to look for the research results.

4) Language barriers.

5) Sometimes difficult to integrate new methods/ materials into the curriculum.

6) if a research project produces research-based guidelines or approaches to teach science (instead of ready-to-use teaching materials), this type of outcome might not be easily adoptable by teachers since they would need to "translate and materialize" these guidelines in their classroom setting and materials.

7) Work load of teachers is too high.

 Websites recommended:

1) The association of mathematics teachers of Portugal (APM) www.apm.pt/portal/index.php

2) Portuguese society math (SPM) http://www.spm.pt/investigacao/

3) programme TV called "Isto é matemática" http://www.youtube.com/user/istoematematica

4) Mathematics for industry http://cmup.fc.up.pt/cmup/apmind/meeting2013/

5) the UK national network of Science Learning Centre (SLCs) www.sciencelearningcentres.org.uk

6) Stella Magid's paper on Biology-technology-educational research. www.openu.ac.il/research_center/chais2011/download/i-magid-82_eng.pdf

www.profiles-project.eu, www.earthweek.com,  www.allea.org/Pages/ALL/19/243.bGFuZz1FTkc.html

www.ejippo.fi, www.gazetadefisica.spf.pt, www.compass-project.eu, http://area.dgidc.min-edu.pt/materiais_NPMEB/home.htm

 Suggestions by teachers

1) Universities could have special web-pages for teachers giving regular overview of recent research results. It would be the most comfortable and efficient way for teachers to get new knowledge about research results.

2) Results of researches communicate to teachers basically through conferences and workshops. It would be better, if we use social media for this goal.