2o Geniko Lykeio Neas Ionias Magnisias
Partner (School) | Greece
The 2nd upper secondary school of Nea Ionia-Volos is in the Nea Ionia suburb of the town of Volos, in central Greece. Volos is located almost halfway between Athens and Thessaloniki on Greek mainland and is a port city (departure spot of the Argonautic expedition).
Our school is a general secondary school with 32 staff and more than 300 students, medium sized for Greek standards. Age range of our students is from 14-15 to 18 years.
We are in the same building complex with a vocational upper secondary school, and we share part of the facilities, like the conference and theatre rooms, as well as the gymnastics hall.
Both Greece and Greek society have undergone a transformation in the last 30 years and those changes are reflected in our school which, when founded in 1985, was a pilot school, very innovative for that time.
Recession has hit the area hard, and the unemployment figures have risen in the last few years, as one after the other big factories closed in the town’s industrial zone. Due to lack of a better option in the job market, pupils tend to continue their studies, hoping for a better future.
Teachers in school form now a young team of enthusiastic and committed people who try to do their best and give their all in a difficult situation.
We receive students from two lower secondary schools in the area. The first one is in a working-class district in the town centre, whilst the second is in a newly built area in the suburbs. Therefore, our students´ background is extremely varied. Still, most of our students generally come from low and middle socioeconomic status families, so they are deprived from getting to know other cultures in their natural and social environment.
An Erasmus+ project is a good opportunity for them to improve their communicative and personal skills. We believe that it is a unique experience for students to broaden their minds and horizons. The students could learn what it means to be a citizen of Europe and understand multicultural societies.
At secondary level of education, pursuing the achievement of competences is top priority. It becomes essential to find the most suitable activities and methods to facilitate students’ process of achievement, despite any social, cultural, or economic obstacles these latter may encounter in their path.
The use of multimedia tools has therefore become quite ordinary in our daily class teaching practice, as well as the realization of videos, powerful tools to make students share important ethical messages and to make them active protagonists in producing their own way of interpreting them. Our school also belongs to a larger territorial network of schools which have been financed to train teachers to use multimedia technologies to develop students’ competences in literacy and math with the goal to foster the teaching/learning process and combat early school leaving (ESL).