Summary (Max. 200 words in English, German, Spanish, French or Italian)
Knowing Me Is Knowing You (KMIKY) is a safe web-based collaborative project focused on cultural awareness and intercultural learning. It helps pupils from all over the world to learn about each other via the Internet and become well-informed global citizens. The project website enables pupils worldwide (assisted by their teachers) to engage in the following cross-cultural activities: Not-to-Be-Missed Places, Famous Stories Travel around the World, Customs and Traditions, Celebrations, My Souvenir etc. Each activity provides teachers with practical guidance on helping learners to make the most of it. The participating classes are encouraged to collect the information they need for this project by: visiting different places (together with their teachers and parents), interviewing people, sending and receiving e-mails, reading brochures, leaflets, newspapers, magazines, books and searching the Internet. A lot of pupils (including children with special needs) have submitted us their contributions (texts and photos related to the above mentioned activities), thus creating a global archive (of personal accounts about different cultures) that aims to increase cultural awareness and foster tolerance and understanding among the peoples of the world. A set of online interactive exercises has been designed to help pupils reinforce the information learned in the project.
Summary of benefits and transferability (in English, German, Spanish, French or Italian)
This web-based collaborative project provides a safe learning environment that celebrates cultural diversity and prepares pupils to be well-informed global citizens. It is very much in tune with the modern views about the purpose and nature of education as it focuses on cultural awareness and intercultural learning. As we all know, an increasing number of countries have started to include the above-mentioned topics as part of their educational and language teaching policies to promote international understanding and world peace. This project encourages the development of co-operation, communicative skills, initiative and research skills. Knowing Me Is Knowing You (KMIKY) also requires pupils to use their knowledge of Geography, History, Social Studies, foreign languages and of course Computer Science. For your information, modern curricula for different school subjects encourage this cross-curricular approach. Moreover, thanks to this project pupils assisted by their teachers can practise complex communication and computer skills, demonstrating how cooperative learning can be part of their lives. The completed students’ work contributes to the building of a rich archive (of personal accounts about different cultures) for the young and the old alike that can serve as a great source of information about different cultures in many fields of education and training for all ages. Knowing Me Is Knowing You (KMIKY) is a good model for demonstrating how cultural diversity is brought into the classroom via the Internet. It also illustrates how new technologies help pupils break through communication and language barriers, learning together by sharing. I believe that, by taking part in the activities provided by the KMIKY project, our pupils have started to understand and respect other cultures and their own and also to discover their neighbours and the worldwide community.
