| Tour de Baltic |
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Therefore all 15 Danish BSP - schools showed great interest to embark on a network building tour visiting Gdansk, Kaliningrad, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn and St. Petersburg. In all cities we visited BSP and possible new BSP-schools. The meeting with the colleagues and students gave us great interest and inspiration. Not only do we share environment but also history. Traveling by bus through all the countries gave a very close experience of just how different and yet comparable all our countries are. Purpose of the tour The idea was to create direct links between teachers and students in the Baltic states and Denmark, but also to encourage students and teachers to interact with each other about projects relating to the BSP-programmes. This was achieved in almost every school, where the visiting teachers and the visited teachers exchanged contact information. The greatest barrier apart from the daily structural obstacles of meeting curricular demands seems to be the language. Interacting through internet resources in a language that is not your mother tongue is a great challenge – both for teachers and students. It seems as though many teachers do not recognize their own communication skills in a foreign language given that they are so used to be very communicative in their own. So the language barrier brings them in embarrassment – a situation that is not attractive. The driver to enhance cross-border communication in spite of these barriers could be a wish to motivate the students by enabling them to have direct interaction with fellow students in other countries.  We were presented with different approaches to the BSP-programme, and in the following a few examples are chosen to illustrate this. We visited a high school that has a very interesting BSP activity on air pollution in Vilnius due to traffic. Presented by 2 enthusiastic and capable students Roma and Simone we were presented with the fact that air pollution is steadily rising in the capital. This has been measured both by observing acid spots on leaves, but also by measuring the content of SO2 in the air? This High school shoved a very conscious approach towards the BSP-areas and is therefore expected to be interested in cooperation with Danish schools.  The new BSP communication site – a possibility to interact directly To facilitate the direct communication between teachers and students in the different countries, a communication site has been established. The address is www.unesco-asp.dk/bsp The idea is to mix the internet-interaction between he students with the work you have to do in school to enhance the motivation of the students to share both topics and BSP initiated activities. Each BSP programme has their own section with descriptions, material downloads and contact possibilities to the international programme coordinator. To each topic there is a discussion forum with possibilities to upload files, text and images that you intend to share with others. By following the same activity patterns it is possible to compare results from the same observations and activities, thereby enhancing the learning potential, but also the potential to get to know eachother across the borders. The greatest barrier for everybody is the English language that is not Mother-tongue of any participants. This barrier can be resolved by using more images and illustrations and less text. |