News . Best Practices Mapping my school
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This good practice reports an open schooling initiative about (Creation and using maps for solving problems), which was developed by Model Junior High School of Heraklion (teacher: Maria Eleftheriou) during (15/10/22 to 25/5/23). The activities included a professional in science (Dr in Geography). It was supported by RDE Crete. This practice was presented previously HERE and HERE.
Care: Students were interested to find out if their school can be accessible in other persons with disabilities, a real-life problem that occurs due to the old building where the school is located. Students who participated in the activities were 24 boys and girls of age 13-14.
Know: Students used knowledge about maps (general and thematic). The skills that students practiced were to create specific questions about the access in the building, to analyze the data, to create maps with the arcgis software, to discuss their findings and to write the conclusions of their study.
Do: At the end, students were worked in small groups of 3 or 4 persons, prepared maps, create a story map, participated in a Greek Contest “Χαρτογραφώντας την προσβασιμότητα” and present their findings in the Greek Students Conference of the Connect project. They supported by their families and the local community of the school.
Findings related to Open Schooling approach: The activity fitted in the curriculum. It was useful for our class of geography because students create their own maps. It was also innovative due to the real problem of the access in the bulding of school . Open schooling might be helpful for other teachers because students learn by doing themselves.
Change/innovation supported by: [ x ] schoolhead [ ] school association/network [ ] local government
[ ] Other: _________________________________________
Students’ Outcomes: Students were create maps and a story map that includes all their work. A group of students participated in the Greek Student Conference for the Connect project and they feel confidence about the project. As an example, a students mentioned ” I enjoyed so much to participate in the Greek Students Conference!”, “ I like to create my own map, I can learn by myself what are the important elements of a map.”
This practice contributed to increasing:
[ x ] families’ engagement in science [ ] girls’ participation in science. [ ] students’ science careers awareness
Please justify: The school faces real problem as concerns the access for persons with disabilities. Students discussed with their families what they can do and what are the solutions in order to reduce this phenomenon.