'What’s new on the news?” Erasmus + project at IES de Catabois

     A few months ago, a young woman from Ferrol, Aroa Fandiño Serrano, contacted me via e-mail. In her mail, she explained that she is specializing in management of European projects and that, after reading about our Erasmus + KA2 project in a newspaper, she was immediately attracted to it. She expressed her interest in arranging an interview with the person in charge of the project at school in order to get information about its implementation and management, the goals we are achieving, the materials produced and the way both the students and the schools involved in the project are living it, what they are learning and so on... She added that she would like to include our project in her blog europeaconvencida.wordpress.com where she deals with topics which try to get Ferrol closer to Europe by relating different European projects with the town, as for example, the Urban Plan.

     Below is the post that she published in her blog talking about our project, after an interview with Maca Torres, coordinator of the project at IES de Catabois.



    Today I want to present you with one of the European projects in my hometown, Ferrol, which I feel is the nicest and most interesting that I know.
   

  “What’s new on the news?” is a Catabois School Project financed by the Erasmus+ programme. The participants are student volunteers from 2nd, 3rd and 4th year (ESO) with other Italian, Turkish, Romanian, Polish and Swedish students.

     How did this Project appear?

     This story starts, as many good ones do, after a nice but sad end in 2013 when the participants of another European project (the Comenius project) called “If I Were You” (IWEY) decided that they wanted to work together on another project because they had more challenges and learning to do together. Amongst  the participants involved in this previous project, IES de Catabois was working together with the schools from Romania and Italy.
   

     How will this project develop?

     This Spanish School is leading the coordination of a new Project in which the students work on two main aspects: on the one hand, their reading and listening comprehension skills and on the other hand, the production of their own news.

     This Project will be running for three courses in which the students will work with different media: radio, newspaper and television. Their main achievement will be the creation of an annual digital newspaper and, at the final step, the publication of an international news broadcast video recording, with the students playing the role of presenters and telling the news which they have created.


                           


     To do this, the students take part in different workshops on the means of communication mentioned in each trip that they make to each participating country. In Ferrol, for instance, they worked on the press and the radio: they analysed newspapers from different countries to see if they had a similar presentation, they wrote articles about the places that they visited, they took part in a live radio programme (la COPE), they visited an exhibition about the history of the radio organized in the high school and they chose their logo from the presented propositions. (It appears at the introduction of this article)

     Apart from all this academic learning, there was also the cultural aspect with visits to the San Felipe castle, the Arsenal, the Médulas, O Cebreiro, Lugo, Santiago de Compostela and A Coruña.
 
     They share this achievement through their blog called “What’s new on the news? Erasmus+ Project”. I do invite everybody to visit it !! :D

     It is possible for you to read about a visit from young foreign people to Ferrol: http://www.ferrol360.es/alumnos-y-profesores-de-cinco-paises-europeos-visitan-ferrol-dentro-del-programa-erasmus-plus/
http://www.ferrol360.es/el-ies-de-catabois-coordina-el-proyecto-whats-new-on-the-news-en-el-que-participan-cinco-paises/

         

     Personally, I love some aspects of this project:

    The students are volunteers.

    It’s the students who choose what they want to write about, so you can find a post about Taylor Swift and another on Donald Tusk.

    This is a Project that creates Europe. Indirectly, with this project, the participants build the fraternity that transforms us into Europeans.

     The coexistence makes us aware of our cultural differences and similarities. The participants will develop the comprehension that will let them face a person from another continent, such as China, Africa or America and look at himself as Europeans.  Accept all the differences that exist between European cultures and be happy to feel as our own, all the similarities that make us a part of this project that we call the European Union.

     Maca Torres, coordinator of this project, said to the press that this project expects “the students to be involved in Europe, and that they have a strong feeling of being European citizens”.

     To end, I would like to thank Maca Torres for her kindness, dedication and effort, to the rest of the teachers and above all, to the students who are the real protagonists of this story and who will create the future Europe.

      By Aroa Fandiño Serrano.