As part of the Erasmus+ KA1 project, teachers Ana Cehmajster and Anica Leventić visited vocational schools in Istanbul at the end of May. The visit was organized with the support of the regional office of the Ministry of Education (Istanbul Provincial Directorate of National Education).During the visit, meetings were held with the representative of the office and their team for Erasmus+ projects, as well as a visit to three vocational schools. Kağıthane Profilo MTAlL school educates students in the fields of electrical and electronic engineering and IT. Students demonstrated their practical works (alarm system, printed 3d models, connecting switches and switches). They exchanged and compared teaching experiences with the teachers. The students in their program have 3 days a week of mandatory practice that they do in companies, which is paid in a certain percentage. In the IT department, students have practical classes/exercises on computers in small groups. We have only seen a part of what they do such as programming in programming languages C++, C#, html and css, databases and multimedia processing and creation. The school system, program and occupations are quite similar to those in our school, so we discussed possible cooperation and the organization of student exchange.ITU Besiktas MTAlB school which works under the auspices of ITU (Istanbul Technical University) which provides them with both spatial and material working conditions. It is an experimental program supported by the Ministry of Education.At the school, students are educated in the fields of electrical engineering and electronics, computing and maritime.We toured the school and school workshops and laboratories, saw what kind of projects students are working on and exchanged examples of good practices. We observed a very interesting model of student clubs, where within the clubs, students mostly work independently and help each other on projects they prepare for various national competitions and innovation fairs. Teacher mentors help them as needed. Also interesting is the practice in which student tutors independently organize online lessons for students who need it, record the lessons, edit them and publish them on the school’s YouTube channel. Students of this school achieve outstanding results in national competitions. The school actively implements Erasmus+ and other projects. We talked about future mutual cooperation on the organization of internships for our students, both in the companies they cooperate with and in the school itself.Kağıthane Profilo MTAlL School. We also visited Uskudar Borsa İstanbul school. It is interesting that it is a women’s school, where girls are educated in the field of computing, but also catering, textiles, care and preschool education.During the visit to the school, we talked with the students, and later with the teachers and management of the school, about the possibilities and ways of organizing professional practice.We consider this visit extremely useful because we shared examples of good practice and compared experiences on developed models, used technologies, projects, practices for students and other issues from the daily activities of schools.We hope that in the future we will cooperate with the visited schools as well as other schools from the Istanbul area and with the regional office of the Ministry of Education.
No responses yet