Mobility program «move on»
GBS St.Gallen is cooperating with more than 15 schools all over Europe in individual exchange programs for vocational education and training. VET-Students of GBS St.Gallen have the possibility to participate in short term internship programs abroad and GBS St.Gallen offers its European partner institutions from all over Europe the possibility to pass short term internships up to six weeks in St.Gallen. We are committed to a close collaboration with a lot of companies in the different occupations in eastern Switzerland to realize on-the-job learning combined with school education for our guest-students.
Together for a sustainable future: Developing VET student´s Generic Skills for Energy Transition – VETskillinG
Five schools from different parts of Europeare joining forces to develop a digital learning program aimed at strengthening the generic skills of students pursuing engineering courses.
This collaboration aims to improve future technicians' competencies in communication, teamwork, leadership, and problem solving. The motivation behind this initiative is to increase the success rate and effectiveness of technical projects, especially those related to the crucial energy transition. This program is a response to the growing demand for technical professionals who not only possess technical knowledge but can also communicate and collaborate effectively within multidisciplinary teams.
A project about Commercials in new media. Creativity is increasingly perceived as a strategic driver for economic growth and a real asset for improving competitiveness in a knowledge-based economy. The Creative Industries are knowledge and labour intensive and foster innovation, so the sector is perceived to have a huge but largely untapped potential for generation of employment and export expansion (CIGN, 2015). Not surprisingly, the creative industry is recognized as a high growth sector in the EU and its member states.
Storytelling is increasingly recognized as a key discipline and activity to bring ideas to the market and to build customer loyalty. As a result, both new media storytelling and new media advertising (e.g., mobile advertising, leveraging social media, creating viral videos) have become an inclusive part of a new marketing strategy, presently barely covered by the existing curricula in many schools. The way of storytelling in commercials, how they are produced and distributed with all the technical possibilities the sector provides, evolved profoundly to meet changing consumers preferences and needs.
The main goal of the «Commercialpolis» project is to improve existing curricula to include the techniques of storytelling. For this purpose the project partners develop two toolboxes to professionalize and trigger students and educators (RIGA communiqué), to meet the following strategic objectives, recommended in the Strategic Framework ET 2020 to member states:
The main objective
The overall objective of this project will be the professionalization of the participating teachers as well as their peers at home, and the implementation of the 21st Century Skills in the strategic agendas of the schools, and, via international networks, also in other schools.
Program
In practice, eight partner schools will work together to train and coach teachers in applying the right 21st Century Skills during six training weeks.
The participating students work on idealistic creative projects and will essentially be the ‘guinea pigs’ for the participating teachers. The training and coaching LTT meetings are organized in three sets of two meetings each, while taking place in different semesters and different cities.
The participating teachers and students remain the same during the first and second LTT meeting of a set, so that reflection, deepening and widening can take place not only during the two meetings but between two meetings. The professionalization of the teachers is directly applied and tested during the LTT meetings, but they will also implement it upon return in their own schools.
International Teamwork
While most of these skills are transversal, different priorities can be placed depending on the domain or industry pupils and students will be working in.
The creative industries are a sector with many special characteristics, e.g., a high emphasis on creativity and individuality, and a large proportion of entrepreneurship (freelancers and the self-employed). As such, special emphasis on those 21st Century Skills relevant for the (future) creative industries would be required for the creative industries education.
As the 21st Century Skills are so practical and related to the vocational work, it would make more sense to teach them in close integration with vocational courses and assignments, but vocational teachers often lack the know-how. At the same time, these 21st Century Skills are part of global developments.
Instead of integrating them individually, VET schools can exchange expertise and collaborate internationally to develop shared strategies to integrate the skills in their own education. As international collaboration and communication are often considered part of the 21st Century Skills, international collaboration can even be seen as a requirement for teaching these skills in practice. Only in international collaboration can learning opportunities be created that prepare students for a career in creative industries that more and more transcend national borders.
In this project, the partners aim to define the most relevant 21st Century Skills for the creative industry education, by analysing the gap between industry needs and educational (VET) offerings.
Research
Two intellectual outputs will be created in the project. While many overviews, frameworks and lists of 21st Century Skills exist, there is little research on the skills that matter most for (future) professionals specifically in the creative industries.
The output report ‘21st Century Skills for the creative industries’ will combine desk research with a consultation of representatives of the creative industries in the networks of all participating partners.
It will prioritize the skills to focus on. Based on the results of this research and the results of the professionalization exercises during the project lifespan, we will create a guidebook (in print and as a website) with practical examples and exercises for VET teachers within the creative industries on how to teach relevant 21st Century Skills and implement them into the learning programs and curriculums of VET schools.
The aim of this 18-month DOCE project is to promote and strengthen the ability of teachers in vocational training institutions in the field of digital skills to create and implement learning units that are independent of time and place.
This should take place in particular, but not exclusively, in the areas of professions from the creative sector. The focus of the project is on building teachers' ability to develop and implement engaging, effective and transferable online, distance and hybrid teaching (simultaneous face-to-face teaching and distance learning) and appropriate learning strategies.
The project will support teachers through practical workshops to develop digital skills and to acquire and develop knowledge using up-to-date and universally accessible online teaching materials and software. By exchanging new ideas, digital resources, individual specialist knowledge and best practices, the resources of all 7 project partners are used and the common know-how is achieved as an international basis for personal work.
It is planned to create great added value by means of various keynotes from other educational stakeholders (educational universities, industry ...) during the training events and the exchange. The invited speakers should use masterclasses and live cases to demonstrate innovative practices and motivate the teachers to exchange ideas and contribute to the learning process. These events will be both analog and digital.
Another project goal is to further develop the digital pedagogical skills of the participating teachers so that they can coach other teachers in their own facilities over the Internet during the duration of the project and beyond (peer consulting / peer coaching). This creates a very valuable multiplier effect for all project partners, which enables effective scaling among all project partners.
The Leonardo Association "KOSMOPOLIS" has been inspired by a television program from the Netherland called METROPOLIS. This television program produced documentaries, which consist of small pieces about the same main topic from different countries and different point of views. Our "KOSMOPOLIS" Association (=all the project partners) was using the internationalization of the partners to make a variation adapted to our students’ profile.
During the whole project period, we produced four different international TV-productions in international student collaboration in each country and we assembled four times to show the produced TV-productions to all the project partners, reflected it, developed the working progress and got inspired by different workshops and keynotes concerning the creation of TV-productions.
To realize this, each project-partner made in each of the four productions-periods an audiovisual production in his own country about the same general subject (=raw-material). Afterwards these raw materials of the different countries, had to be sent to all the participating project partners where this raw-material was edited and cut together to one final TV-production, which contained production-parts of all the different project partners. This final TV-production of every partner had been uploaded to the FTP server of the Association. Like this, we realized four different TV-productions in each country during the whole project period about fours different "general subjects". All these TV-productions have been published on the project website (www.mykosmopolis.com), which includes also impressions and the detailed programs of all the project meetings.
The produced documentaries cared about these main topics from point of view of youngsters/students and showed ordinary people in ordinary situations related to the main topic.
The network has been based on the areas of activity concerning to audio-visual industry and its relationship with education and training. There have been 5 partners taking part in this network, and all of them are VET schools concerning to audio-visual education.
THINK!digital is a project to that supports the process of successful innovation in VET within the innoVET-Network.