B.SMART4EUROPE - Be Smart For Europe

"B.Smart4Europe - “Learning to read is lighting a fire” (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables)With increasing digitalization in all situations of life, but especially in professional life, it is becoming increasingly important for young people to develop the appropriate reading skills or comprehension strategies. They need to develop an awareness of responsible use of texts and information. This is particularly challenging for young people with a migrant background.At the same time, young people are increasingly losing interest in reading texts or deciphering core ideas. By focusing on smart media (e.g. smartphones, iPads), young people are strongly prone to unreflective knowledge consumption and blunt in their problem-solving creativity.With the B.Smart4Europe project, schools from Belgium, Germany, Finland, Italy and Austria tried to counteract the decreasing enthusiasm for reading and reading skills of students in a smart and innovative way. The aim was to highlight the importance of reading and reading comprehension in an increasingly digital world and to work together with the students to promote student-activating and creative (smart, digital) teaching concepts for the use of texts and literature.The participating project schools are vocational schools from five European countries which have recognised that the above challenges are similar in all project countries and that this problem is best addressed through European cooperation. The project schools are:- Belgium: Vrij Technisch Instituut Voorzienigheid (Diest) - Germany: Max-Weber-Berufskolleg (Düsseldorf) - Finland: OSAO (Oulu) - Italy: Istituto Istruzione Superiore Alfredo Panzini (Senigallia) and Landesberufsschule für das Gastgewerbe SAVOY (Merano) - Austria: Landesberufsschule Hartberg For more than three years, the project schools have worked intensively on smart and digital teaching approaches to promote reading skills in the classroom and/or complementary teaching modules/concepts. The schools chose different approaches to implement the ideas, depending on their organizational structure:- Working groups (Senigallia, Diest, Hartberg),- Foreign language teaching (Merano) or bilingual teaching (Oulu, Dusseldorf)- Teaching modules (Senigallia, Hartberg, Düsseldorf)- and at six transnational project meetings.The students have also made a decisive contribution to the success of the ""B.Smart4Europe"" project. Before and during six transnational learning activities, the students intensively applied, tested and gave feedback on the smart learning concepts developed. They dealt with youth books in English in a smart/digital way and herewith developed a creative approach to reading and reading competence.The following youth books have been selected for assignments including smart media (e.g. tablet computers and apps) to promote reading skills:- As red as blood- The Wave- Tschick- Fly away home- In the sea there are crocodilesThe assignments and examples of the student results are published on the project blog: www.bsmart4europe.eu as well as in the eTwinning project B.Smart4Europe.Already during the project, the results were presented and discussed in schools in various ways (e.g. information at conferences, in-school training). In the long term, each project school has defined a specific concept for continuation (e.g. implementation in curricula).With the B.Smart4Europe project, students were inspired to read youth books in an innovative and creative way. At the same time, they were shown that tablet computers and smartphones could be used in various productive ways in learning processes. In the long term, the project has improved the concept of teaching and school development as follows and has supported the partner schools in their process of professional digitalization:- Smart, digital teaching strategies- Individual support (incl. self-organized learning)- Promoting language and reading skills- (In-school) teacher training- Innovative and forward-looking organizational changes (e.g. project teaching, teaching modules)- Adding (digital, smart) teaching sequences or teaching content to the curricula- Internationalizing teaching and taking the international background of pupils into account"