What is non-formal education?

In the encyclopedic dictionary, non-formal education is defined in three ways:

1. Continues throughout life, during which attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge are formed as a result of available resources and daily experiences (family, neighbors, market, library, mass media, work, games, etc.).

2. Any planned program of individual and social education, which is not part of official training programs and which aims to improve knowledge, skills, and competencies.

3. Vocational education, except for vocational higher education, which a person received independently from a vocational educational institution or as a result of assimilation of a non-accredited educational program.

Therefore, non-formal education is used for education outside the formal, national curriculum, the task of which is

It is the development of students in different directions and the development of necessary skills for them in the 21st century.

Today's schools and teachers are obliged to take care to develop the student's critical thinking, creativity, understanding of the issue, problem identification and solving cooperation, and other important skills.

I often used this method of teaching before. Since 2016, my students and I have been involved in the eTwinning program, in the same year I became and still have the status of Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert. This is what made me know so much more about informal education and its benefits. Since then, I have implemented and am implementing many projects together with my students. Some were initiated, others I collaborated with. I mainly planned and implemented projects with interesting topics together with European colleagues.

I would like to present to you how we can make our work more interesting and fun, interest and "fascinate" students, and thus raise awareness of several issues and develop the necessary skills.

eTwinning takes a student-centered approach and promotes the development of 21st-century skills in students.

Media literacy and disinformation are the most important issues today. Since many Chverngans have become victims of misinformation at least once, we have not thought much about the safety of the Internet, so I decided to implement the project "Media literacy and disinformation (digital literacy and disinformation)" to raise awareness among my students. Foreign colleagues: 15 teachers from different countries participated in the project:

Turkey(7), Georgia(3), Croatia(2), Latvia(1), Romania(1), Greece(1)

The age of the students was 11-16. Subjects: technology, social studies/literature. Sociology, media education, history, geography, foreign languages, environmental education, and citizenship.

The goal of the project was: students would be able to understand the essence of media literacy, understand its types based on examples, and easily recognize fake news. to raise their own and others' awareness of the issue; Get new knowledge (and not only) using Web 2 tools. to develop 21st-century skills; They would develop a sense of responsibility, learn teamwork, and cooperation and become more self-confident. In addition, they would make friends with foreign peers. They would better master a foreign language (in terms of practical use).

We wrote interesting activities that we had to do step by step.

One of the most important conditions for any project is the permission obtained from the parents, according to which we are allowed to publish pictures and videos of students on our eTwinning profile, TwinSpace, groups, etc. eTwinning takes student privacy and security seriously. We have embedded copies of this permission on the relevant page of our project.

From the beginning, we wrote the project's rules of conduct, which were common to students and teachers. For example Intellectual Property - We must ensure that the content we upload to the Platform does not infringe copyright. Before sharing images, videos, documents, or other resources, make sure you have the right to do so. No direct or indirect threats, bullying, or harassment.

To receive a local or European quality mark, one of the necessary conditions is the connection with the project curriculum. All teachers have completed this task on the relevant page.

A separate page was devoted to the presentation of students and teachers so that we could get to know each other. For the same purpose, we presented our school and the city in which we live.

The next stage was the logo contest. Every project needs its logo, and each participating school submitted one winning logo from an internal competition, from which the students had to choose the best one. The main condition of the competition was to highlight the logo corresponding to the title and theme of the project.     

 The members of the project met regularly on the ZOOM platform, we used WhatsApp and the Facebook group to communicate. Taking into account the ability of each member, we divided the tasks, and that particular activity had one or two responsible persons.

To ensure that all teachers were actively involved and that no activity was missed, we conducted intermediate and final monitoring.

Within the framework of the project, we guests conducted surveys for students and parents and held essay and drawing contests.

The activities were relevant to the theme. We created booklets, e-books. We had meetings with the population living in the vicinity of the school, we distributed leaflets to raise their awareness (all this caused great interest in the community).

  For more fun, to raise interest and awareness, since the project started in November and lasted until June, we dedicated separate activities to New Year's greetings, sending each other greeting cards, celebrating Earth (April 22) and eTwinning (May 9) international days (sometimes modifying the original project plan We have to or introduce additional activities. This makes our project more interesting).

The final product of the project was a blog, which included theoretical and visual material of all project activities, which, if interesting and needed, will help my colleagues and not only me.

At the end of the project, we presented our blog to the school community and placed it on the school page.

If in Europe, initially, non-formal education was perceived as an innovation, today it is our everyday life, due to the development of information and communication technologies, which allows us to overcome space and time and our students receive much more than they have ever received.