Open your Mind
Start date: Jun 20, 2014,
End date: Jun 30, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
Our school is located in in the environment which provides students and teachers with limited opportunities for personal and career development. Unfortunately, our region belongs to the least developed in Slovenia according to different indices. An enormous outflow of young people is a sad fact, which is due to poor variety of educational programs that are offered here and consequently fewer possibilities to find a job. We have been coping with the problem of reduced enrolment in our school and we believe that additional contents would be a good promotion of our school. Namely, this year a lot of younger students and their parents have showed a lot of interest in international mobility activities.
The participants of the project “Open your mind” will be students of Secondary School of Economics and Commerce Brežice attending programs of economic technician and logistics technician. In both programs students of the 3rd year have to carry out a 2-week work placement. Therefore, the central activity of this mobility will be work placement of 20 students in companies abroad. All the students did their work placement in local companies in their 2nd year of school. It involved receiving and sending post, recording transactions in day books of a company /working with cash registers, manipulating databases and entering data, archiving documents, business correspondence and working with customers. An international experience means upgrading students’language, communication competences and work skills as well as personal qualities. The work placement of economic technician program students will refer to administration field. Their work will consist of: sorting out the post, managing diaries, answering the phones, greeting clients, writing business letters, preparing presentations, using ICT in administration and using office devices (fax machine, copy machine, etc). The students of logistic technician program will fill in transport documentation and do logistic correspondence using ICT.
As a part of Vocational matura exams students are obliged to make a project work, so the participants of this mobility will focus in their projects on comparison of Slovenian and English economy systems and on transposition of good business practices in the Slovenian environment. Through this experience students are expected to be additionally motivated to learn English for specific purposes, to develop their business sense and to become mobile within the European labour market. The objective to decrease early school leaving could be achieved through increased motivation of students, different teaching methods and actualisation of work and life, all of which is provided with this project.
The “open your Mind” project is carried out by a coordinator cooperating with teachers of economics and logistics subjects and teachers of English. Tasks and responsibilities are assigned through the phase of application of candidates, choosing the participants and preparation for mobility as well as at mobility monitoring and post-mobility evaluation and dissemination. Results of the project will be presented by the students on “open door days”, on the information day, on “Festival of education” (“Festival izobraževanja”) and on technical days in primary schools. The model of cooperation with the Youth Centre Brežice (MC Brežice) and the Posavje Museum Brežice has proven as very successful in the context of presenting our work in international projects to the local community, so we intend to keep this model also for this project.