The principle objective is to produce a website “The Virtual European Teenager”.

The word “Virtual” conveys the idea that the project will be published on the internet and also that the project will propose an ideal virtual school and recommend the ideal work life-style balance that European teenagers should aspire to.

The research is done by sub-groups composed of students from all schools under the guidance of a teacher. They investigate a different element of school life in each country and share information via a social networking site.

Subject choices, nature of the school day, school facilities, and free time options provide the focal points.

Each school collects and formats findings through photographs, tables, video, charts and text; then forwarded for publishing by the co-ordinating school (Rydal Penrhos School).

Findings in both years will be represented in web pages. At the end of each school year, the final group meeting will analyze all the data collected and allow the students to decide what they consider to be an ideal European School. At the end of year2 students adopt the same process to determine the ideal work-life balance.

Styles of teaching and educational methodologies are quite distinct between older and newer EU member state schools. The social contexts of the establishments are also quite distinct. Collegium Josephinum in Bonn is all boys, Rydal Penrhos is international in that a high proportion of students are from overseas without English as their mother tongue. Our Gymnazium sv. Cyrila a Metoda is a Catholic foundation school and regarded as an academic institution with good examination results.

The partnership will provide opportunities to experience and learn from alternative pedagogical methods. Participating schools expect that pupils will draw upon their socially diverse background in their reflections on the nature of school, home life and free time and that pupils will have a greater sense of commonality and a shared sense of experience with other European teenagers.

We would like to improve existing language skills.

Social and interpersonal skills of all participants will be improved especially the skills of working together, problem solving and communication. All schools will open participation to individuals from diverse social, economic or ethnic backgrounds. Our objective is the development of transferable skills for life; the ability to work and communicate with others overseas to achieve a common goal using communications technology as a medium.

In each year 5 groups of students are to be set up, each looking at a different topic for investigation.

The topics to be studied are as follows:

Year one: THE VIRTUAL EUROPEAN TEENAGER IN SCHOOL