Recommendations

Considering the fact that this project was carried out under very challenging conditions, it brought with it great successes and confidence that a similar activity is worth developing.
The most significant factors affecting learning motivation in this project were students’ contacts with students from another country, students’ participation in planning their own learning, accessibility of experts throughout the learning process, new nature experiences, studying nature from the perspective of diversity, students’ participation in documenting learning experiences using scientific methods.
For the further development of similar projects, we have compiled a list of things to pay attention to:

Planning

  • Since schools prepare their annual plans well in advance and must follow them closely, the planning work must start in the academic year preceding the year of project implementation.
  • Teachers need ready learning material for project planning. Especially the concept of biodiversity is poorly represented in current learning materials.
  • There should be built a portal as the basis of the planning, where a network of researchers and teachers from all over Europe, planning instructions, learning material, tips, schedules, etc. will be collected.
  • During the planning process, in-service training for the implementation of the project is organized for the teachers.
  • Accurate scheduling, including dates and times, is important at the very beginning of planning.

Communication tools

  • Commonly used software should be found as tools for collecting and transmitting information. A common portal with approved data security settings would be the best tool for this.
  • The software should work in such a way that teachers can assign tasks to students and students can transfer information there regardless of time and place.
  • Pupils should be able to communicate with each other responsibly, even in their free time, because such contacts have been found to promote the development of communication skills

Documentation

  • As mentioned above, this type of international project requires a server through which operations can be supported, and process information is collected.
  • You must be able to do documentation from different end devices, such as phones, laptops, etc.
  • The aim of the documentation is that the schools/students present the characteristics of their environment, but an important part of the documentation is also to find commonalities, with the help of which the diversity of the same phenomenon can be observed.
  • Recommended resources for future projects
  • We hope that the project we piloted will be the beginning of an established practice across Europe. Therefore, the search for resources for this great learning unit must be started. Here are some items that require additional resources.
  • For this portal, partners should be sought from both information technology companies and producers of learning materials.
  • Teachers’ planning, in-service training and reporting time (substitutes).
  • Costs of study trips.
  • Working hours of experts
  • Materials
  • A network of companies and communities that can cooperate with projects

We have also accumulated past experiences from international school cooperation and collected them on servers built to share information about forestry and bioeconomy. Based on these previous projects and the one presented here, we can warmly recommend this type of international school cooperation. Here are the addresses for the servers we have been closely involved in setting up and where this Forgenius for schools pilot is implemented for sharing and further linking:

openmetsa.fi
metsabiotalous.fi