Digital guide about developing 4Cs

Rainbow paper border

▶️ Look for inspiration everywhere ▶️ Tell stories, make your own stories ▶️ Do exercises that develop creatitivy ▶️ Face new challenges ▶️ Always look for new things, try new things ▶️ Put your brain to work and try hard ▶️ Practice on problem solving techniques ▶️ Learn and do things you love ▶️ Read books ▶️ Watch movies ▶️ Play chess ▶️ Write, paint, draw ▶️ Think a lot ▶️ Take notes ▶️ Be self-confident

You can easily integrate digital tools for content creation in your classroom practice!&nbsp;For example, students can choose digital tools to present their knowledge on a certain subject, to write an essay, to make a podcast, or to create a small interactive game. This way, we are both allowing our students to work on multimodal tasks, strengthening their knowledge in different forms of media (images, moving images, text, etc.), and at the same time&nbsp;empowering them to choose the medium to share their knowledge with which they are most comfortable.

Working with content creation also makes it easy to bring up subjects as media-and information literacy with the students.&nbsp;

Digital tools to foster collaborative learning

✅ Explain Everything: While a whiteboard, it has many different features that will make it invaluable in a collaborative learning practice.

✅ Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Slides

Why communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking (4Cs) are important

In this fast-changing world we cannot predict what the future holds and the things we are learning today might not be necessary tomorrow. However, the 21st century skills: COMMUNICATION, COLLABORATION, CREATIVITY and CRITICAL THINKING (the 4Cs) are and will be particularly needed and valued. They are crucial for our educational, professional and personal success. At the same time, the 4Cs are the foundation of being a competent citizen; they give us tools to be active members of our community, to control our lives, to make the world a better place. For these reasons, we need to constantly work on developing the 4Cs, remembering that our learning should never stop.

Want to be more creative? Go for a walk

Presentations about human right activists

Michał Kutryba

Spanish Human Rights Musicians

Portuguese social activist leaders: António Guterres &amp; Maria Barroso

Videos about one's country and other countries involved in the project

🎬 Students made a video presenting their vision of their own nation and their vision of other nations that take part in the project.

<a href="https://padlet.com/bognalasica/wv1j7y6brzv2">Padlet with the videos</a>

✅ Padlet: this tool allows you to create collaborative boards in which you can represent timelines, bookshelves, processes, message boards and many other elements.

✅ Whiteboard.fi: students can freely draw and write in this online board, which will allow them to unlock their creativity and to work in an alternative medium.

✅ Wakelet: Is a content curation platform where teachers and students can save links, social media posts, videos, and images as items to later be organized into private or public collections. Users can add notes to each Item in order to tell a story, ask questions, or give directions.

✔️ Raise awareness about citizenship in general ✔️ Foster collaboation by promoting the mutual understanding ✔️ Develop and strengthen the constant use of critical thinking and creativity ✔️ Create in students an awarness of importance of developing the 4 Cs

✔️ eTwinning project ✔️ mobilites&nbsp; ✔️ videos about the partner country&nbsp; ✔️ photo display about the past ✔️ creative games ✔️ debate ✔️ digital guides to promote competent citizenship

Our students need to learn how to develop their skills in a freer way, as they are too much accustomed to working&nbsp;following&nbsp;instructions and not taking the chance of expressing themselves&nbsp;(except in art, music or in the projects they prepare for the different subjects), but these also seemed&nbsp;a bit too limited.&nbsp;We saw this as an excellent&nbsp;opportunity to release their new ideas. They were going to be the main characters in the project and responsible for the activities, games or any other task&nbsp;focusing on their creativity, discovering that they were&nbsp;very capable of boosting and designing new ideas, even in a foreign language.&nbsp;&nbsp; As a result, our students had fulfilled our expectations and their creativity has been enhanced by their enthusiasm in the development of the different tasks and projects. We are really proud of them and of their contribution to the Erasmus four Cs !!

The success of the project collaboration speaks for itself in this collaborative meme.

<a href="https://twinspace.etwinning.net/75997/home">Creating Competent Citizens using 4Cs</a>

From the beginning of this Erasmus project, named as The Four Cs, the Spanish team chose to work on creativity, one of the four Cs which gives the name to our common aim. The reason why we did it was that we thought it would be the most motivating for our students and, specially, for those involved in the project.&nbsp;We think that creativity should be added as one the key competences that are included in the education laws after the European Union members, through the European Council,&nbsp;agreed&nbsp;on defining the seven key competences that&nbsp;secondary students should acquire to prepare for either employment or higher education.&nbsp;

&nbsp;Most of the students are confident about their ability to work with others and know of methods to develop the skills of collaboration.&nbsp;

The students participating in the project say that they are creative when solving a problem and they know some methods to develop creativity.

And it is very interesting to see how we manage to communicate in different situations and with different people. In our times, due to this pandemic situation, we are experiencing a new unexpected way of communicating: we mostly communicate virtually, we see and talk to each other in this innovative way, which has enabled us to quickly adapt again. Erasmus projects are extremely important to encourage communication skills in teenagers from different countries,&nbsp;English skills, ICT skills, ect, all equally important for the citizens of the future.

https://pixabay.com/ https://www.freepik.com/ https://www.flaticon.com/

This guide has been made by the teachers and students participating in the project.

Competent Citizens Pandemic Diary

During the spring 2020 lockdown, students wrote about their experiences in the a diary and posted some photos.

Online diary 4CS

We chose COMMUNICATION as our topic in the 4Cs project as we think it is the basic ability which people build&nbsp;social, love and working relations on. What could we do if we weren’t able to communicate with each other? Communication has different channels: verbal, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, written, ecc, so each living being has his way of communicating. Each kind of communication has its codes and rules, and ways to communicate have changed continuously since the beginning of the world, and people from any side of the world have been continuously adapting themselves to these changes. We keep adapting our communication depending on what we communicate, who we communicate with, on feelings and needs.

Erasmus + project Creating Competent Citizens using 4Cs

Why is content creation important in the classroom?

In a time when digital tools and gadgets are taking a bigger role in our lives, it is important to encourage our students to become creators of digital content and not just consumers.&nbsp;It is important that students have an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and to practice the skills needed to create their own content in school, either it being done in groups or alone.

🔷 Let's find out who we are&nbsp; COLLABORATION 🔷 Our past COMMUNICATION 🔷 Our Present - where are we now? CREATIVITY 🔷 Our Future - what's next? CRITICAL THINKING

📍 Understand your objective. Why are you communicating? 📍Understand your audience. With whom are you communicating? What do they need to know? 📍Plan what you want to say, and how you'll send the message. 📍Seek feedback on how well your message was received.

Good communicators use the KISS&nbsp;&nbsp;("Keep It Simple and Straightforward") principle. They know that less is often more, and that good communication should be efficient as well as effective.

Romanian social activist - Queen Helen

Tips to improve communication

▶️ Work on your foreign language skills ▶️ Be friendly and helpful ▶️ Use tips from rhetoric experts ▶️ Ask people how you could improve in communication ▶️ Socialize and interact with others ▶️ Participate in school activities and projects ▶️ Talk more to people ▶️ Exchange opinions ▶️ Know people better ▶️ Build good atmosphere ▶️ Speak without fear what others will say ▶️ Try not to quarrel ▶️ Don't criticize too much ▶️ Be an active listener

The students participating in the project reported that they know how to think critically to solve a problem.

&nbsp;Most of the students know how to communicate with others to work on a project.

Romania - Erasmus+ 4Cs

Spain - Erasmus 4Cs

Sweden - Erasmus+ 4Cs

5 tips to improve your critical thinking

▶️ Choose a team leader ▶️ Build a strong team ▶️ Establish the goals with the team ▶️ Create a plan of your work and stick to it ▶️ Assign different tasks ▶️ Speak about the tasks ▶️ Sectionalize tasks ▶️ Know each others' opinions ▶️ Let everyone speak ▶️ Listen to the others ▶️ Search the best solution ▶️ Use the strengths of each member of the team

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally, understanding the logical connection between ideas.&nbsp;Critical thinking has been the subject of much debate and thought since the time of early Greek philosophers such as Plato and Socrates and has continued to be a subject of discussion into the modern age, for example the ability to recognise&nbsp;fake news.

Critical thinking might be described as the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. One of the most important aspects of critical thinking is to decide what you are aiming to achieve and then make a decision based on a range of possibilities.

📌 I Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Władysława Broniewskiego w Bolesławcu, Bolesławiec, Poland

📌 IISS Ruggero II, Ariano Irpino, Italy

📌 Agrupamento de Escolas de Muralhas do Minho, Valença, Portugal

📌 Colegiul National „Nicu Gane”, Fălticeni, Romania

📌 IES FUENTESAÚCO, Fuentesaúco, Spain

📌 Djäkneparksskolan, Norrköping, Sweden

Collaborative learning helps students develop skills and competences,&nbsp;like digital competence, entrepreneurship, and mathematical, science, technology and engineering competence. Furthermore, it boosts&nbsp;their problem solving, and their ability to deal with group dynamics. As educators, by working and learning in a collaborative way, we can also&nbsp;develop and train our intellectual and social skills.

Digital tools to enhance critical thinking

✅ Kialo Edu. It is a unique tool for teaching critical thinking. Its clear, visually compelling format makes it easy to follow the logical structure of a discussion and facilitates thoughtful collaboration. Kialo’s mission is to promote well-reasoned discussion online, and to that end, Kialo is free for educators to use.

✅ Tricider - Is a web-based tool to generate and evaluate ideas and to support class discussions. It allows students to discuss various topics online.

✅ Mind mapping is one of the best activities for understanding, especially collaboratively among learners. Tools like&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mindmaple.com/">Mindmaple</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://mindnode.com/">MindNode</a>&nbsp;stand out among some of the best mind mapping tools available on the Web.

Italy - Erasmus 4Cs

Poland - Erasmus 4Cs

Portugal - Erasmus 4 CS

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Digital tools to foster creativity

✅ Pixton - This tool gives students the opportunity to create amazing comic strips. They can create characters, comic panels, props, speech bubbles, and every other aspect of a comic strip to create a customized and fun-to-read story.

✅ Prezi - It is s a fantastic tool that uses a visually stimulating, moving canvas that spices up any classroom presentation.

✅ Storybird - It is a fantastic site whose mission is to help students improve their reading, writing, and creative skills.&nbsp;

✅ ThinkLink - It allows students to transform digital images into interactive and educational stories by adding music, videos, and text to the images.

Manipulation in our national media

Manipulation in our national media 

<a href="https://prezi.com/view/aG8toXSR3W1NmXUVM9yj/">Spanish presentation </a>

Ebook with all the Memes created collaboratively by students

Memes

▶️ Be objective ▶️ Take part in debates, ▶️ Read a lot ▶️ Be open-minded ▶️ Analyse reality ▶️ Do math exercises ▶️ Share your views with others ▶️ Listen to other people's opinions ▶️ Watch the news, read newspapers

Most people do not work alone. Most people do not become successful within something they do by themselves, but with the help and support from others. Collaboration feeds success and enables prosperity in life.&nbsp;

Name

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