"The project partners - Riga Technical School of Tourism and Creative Industry (Latvia), Provinciaal Instituut PIVA, Antwerp, Belgium and Helsinki Vocational College (Finland) has known each other for many years from the C.H.A.S.E (Consortium of Hospitality and Accommodation Schools of Europe) network. These partners worked together in EU mobility projects as a receiving & sending partner for Restaurant - Kitchen - Bakery - Hospitality in vocational education. On the annual meeting of this network in November 2013 first planning started to work together in the field of tourism education. It was nice to have 3 big cultural cities in the project with other background, other religions, other basic language & different education system. For this project partners agreed to focus on VET students between 15 till 17 years (for all of these students English is a second language). The aim of this project was to provide learners & trainers of VET in tourism field the ability to create new, ICT based methods of learning on their own level. The transnational co-working in this project was a value: participants integrated the languages, art, culture, religion, architecture, history. Tourism teachers and students from 3 VET schools worked together - first, VET students learned about cultural environment, architecture, religions, local and international history of other country and by using local language, then worked together with participants from other schools via Facebook group, e-mail google drive by making theoretical base for tourism routs in the city. Within learning/teaching/training activities students and teachers from different countries together developed new teaching tools in tourism - digital and developed from knowledge and ICT skills if participants. Once a year a group of students from each school did a try-out of the created tool ""on the spot"" during a short learning mobility. During this project, 6 new digital city guiding routes were created using GoogleMaps platforms, all the routs are created in 6 EU languages - English, Latvian, French, Dutch, Finish and Swedish. Digitization in both - education and tourism is becoming a topicality. Students learning in VET in tourism fields are a bit left behind therefore this project was a huge step in bringing use of digital tools in tourism education. Impact was greater than expected - we faced challenges in lack of ICT skills of teachers as well as lack of meaningful use of technologies among the students. This project was eye opener on current situation and the routed developed by project participants will be used as sample teaching material."

This Project aims on building a sustainable working career by supporting health and wellbeing. This is done with a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives surrounding the concept of 21st century skills, individual competences and personal capabilities. This project addresses to three key aspects of building a sustainable future: it supports the Wellbeing, Enhances the development of entrepreneurial skills and gives a chance to develop lifelong learning skills for its participants. The promotion of good health is a of particular importance in the Europe 2020 strategy, especially in relation to the attainment of its smart and inclusive growth priorities. Health expenditure constitutes a significant part of government and private expenditure in the European Union (EU). There is a strong correlation between educational attainment and self-perceived health. According to the European statistics the low-educated people have the least positive assessment of their health status. Personal habits play a crucial role in wellbeing thru maintaining good health and ability to work. Largest causes of early retirement in Europe are all related to the inactive lifestyle, dietary habits, and mental health. Students will need skills to obtain, to interpret and understand basic health information and services and use such information and services in ways that are enhancing the wellbeing. It is also vital that the students understand preventive physical and mental health measures, including proper diet, nutrition, exercise, risk avoidance and stress reduction and use the available information to make appropriate health-related decisions. Educational institutions can support this process by educating their students but a more sustainable solution would be to support a change of culture within the college in a manner that the students can relate to. How can we reach this goal? The one’s that can best answer the question are the students! Giving them a chance to discuss these themes in multicultural and multidisciplinary working groups give these findings and solutions a broader impact and can at its best be seen as a new movement to feel well. This project is designed to have four identical cycles and each of them is crucial to build the new culture of wellbeing to vocational colleges. Each of these weeks will ponder in a sub theme of health that will be investigated and influenced • Lifemanagement (Sleep, Stress, Psycological wellbeing, Social relations) • Alcohol, smoking and other drugs • Physical activity (Daily activities, Motivation for motion) • Nutrition (Balanced diets, Weight management) During the project weeks 20 students from Finland, Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia will gather their ideas on the topic and discuss possible solutions and suitable means to get the message for wellbeing thru to their peers in five multidisciplinary and multinational groups. Students are encouraged by a coach (teacher) to investigate the theme further and test the possible solutions in the hosting college. These learning activities are also the place where the media students get to test their entrepreneurial skills on using analyzed material to build something new. Their way of working is similar to gamegams. Once the students have formed their idea their media-consultant (5 students from Helsinki Vocational College per each project week) is there to make it real/do a prototype of a game that can then be developed further. This layout is based on problem and project based learning. Instead of using a rigid lesson plan that directs a learner down a specific path of learning outcomes or objectives, project based learning allows in depth investigation of a topic worth learning more about. The methodology of problem based learning asks for seeing the interlinks of creativity and research competences but also offers a chance for an interplay between sustainability and entrepreneurship. As an outcome of this project participating organizations will receive concrete tools to improve wellbeing of students and work welfare of staff members. Main impact factors for students are improvement in their life management skills and health. This will reduce days of absence and same time improve studying skills. Better life management skills and healthier lifestyle will help students in their studies and there will be a big impact for succeeding to graduate in time. Participating organisations will have positive impact in their economy when students have better probability to graduate in time and have smaller odds to drop their studies because of life management problems or health issues. Improved life management skills and wellbeing will also have longer impact in future work careers of students. Healthier work career will reduce days of sick leave and improve efficiency at work. Therefore also employer organisations will have positive impact when participating organisations will produce healthier employees in the future.

"Surveyor's Opportunities for Collaborative Surveying (acronym SOCS) is Strategic partnership initiative by four training organisations all providing qualification in Surveying. Three partners are VET-colleges: Helsinki Vocational College, FInland, Istituto di Istruzione Seconadaria Superiore ""Buontalenti - Cappellini -Orlando"", Italy and Berufskolleg Cuno2, Germany. Fourth partner is Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Høgskulen på Vestlandet. The need for SOCS arose from the fact that participating colleges all agreed that internationalisation is on too low level within land surveying VET, e.g. students' possibilities to do practical training periods abroad.Partnership group focuses on strengthening and sharing of key competencies in Surveying and enhancing internationalisation of the sector, in participating colleges and especially among their students and teachers. The project is based on idea of collaborative learning for students in transnational groups during four one-week workshops each having separate surveying-theme as content. Themes have been built to resemble working life processes of surveying, gathering of data and applying the data into practices used in surveying sector. Thus, in first workshop week includes also gathering of data which in used used in 3D-modelling in second workshop, among other goals of the workshops. Similarly in third workshop data is gathered and later on processed in fourth workshop. Each workshop has also its own specific contents on top of continuum of data gathering and processing. These contents focus on methods of gathering and processing data, various equipment and software used for different purposes in surveying in different countries. Furthermore, health and safety norms, measures and risks of surveying are included in each workshop's agenda as a generic topic, as these topics vary regarding to what line of work processes of surveying are dealt with in various themes. In order to enhance internationalisation and to improve preparations for surveying students' KA1-type of longer mobility periods/practical training periods abroad, participating students will build up 5-language surveying glossary (EN-FI-DE-IT-NO) of key concepts. During the four workshop weeks taking place in the project, each college will have 15 students participating in the project as each college will have 5 students per workshop week. Therefore students hosting their national workshop week will have to have the possibility to participate in one workshop abroad, and therefore total number of students per college sums up to 15. In all, during the process 60 surveying students will have possibility to participate in workshops. Number of teachers is more limited, as apart for HVL/NO all other partner college's surveying departments are quite small and rotation of participating surveying teachers has to be decided within colleges. According to plan there will be one surveying teacher going abroad with group of five students.Working process in workshops consists of theme-related pre-assignments that are processed in transnational smaller student groups and of practical training sessions both indoors (e.g. 3D-modelling of gathered data) and outdoors (e.g. gathering data with drones) and visits to surveying companies during the workshop weeks. Each workshop week is more or less a mixture of different learning methods, small transnational group work, discussions, comparisons, building up summaries and presentations, active hands-on-surveying work and company visits. All summaries and results of pre-assignments are saved to act as supportive learning material when preparing surveying students for longer practical training periods abroad. For participating teachers the project provides excellent possibilities to learn from other other colleges' colleagues their pedagogic approaches and methods, get to know different types of equipment and software/applications and how these are used in teaching / learning processes of future surveyors. Participation also consolidates co-operation between colleges and enables them to share other external surveying college and company contacts with each other, once again promoting and facilitating surveying students' practical training periods in another Member State.According to discussions taken place between partners, project facilitates boosting surveying students' internationalisation, especially when sharing the experiences and practices between colleges, sending and receiving surveying students becomes more appealing for all parties. Partners are also anxious to share their experiences with other, mainly national level VET-providers and with their EU-level already existing surveying colleges via dissemination of the results. Aim in the long run is to enhance and facilitate surveying sector's internationalisation in VET, and by sharing the experiences and recruiting more surveying VET-providers to the SOCS-network."

Future is in our hands was a project that wanted to prepare its participants as well as the organizations for the future. It aimed on giving an opportunity for initial and continuous professional development of VET teachers, trainers and mentors as well as to promote innovative approaches to provide key competencies and work-specific skills to the learners. Future was not only dealt with through the themes of the Future labs but offered a testing lab to elaborate new learning environments. To accommodate to the change of the working life new ways of working within teams and organizations was seen as crucial. The project wanted to foster innovation and underline the importance of “soft” skills such as collaboration, teamwork, creativity and learning. That is why the four Future labs were based on team pedagogy. This project enhanced the creativity, innovative thinking and flexibility in multidisciplinary groups. The key to the succses was to offer the teachers participating in the project an intensive three days training on the methodology. It also helped with strong bonding within the teachers participating in the project. The main purpose of the project weeks was to activate the students into learning to learn in a more informal setting, in the four FUTURE LABS organized in this project. The themes of the Future labs were based on global megatrends and challenges of the future working life and were chosen in the first project meeting. The Future labs were held in each of the participating country. The problems that the students solved were based on interviews done in each of the participants’ home country and work places relevant to the field of study. Each of the weeks offered a chance to investigate the topic in a relevant company. For both parties to gain understanding on each other’s needs. The future labs gave a learning opportunity for 80 learners on cultural awareness, communication in a foreign language with methods where everyone’s contribution is equally important for the final result and success. Both participating teachers and students truly were in a “pressure cooker” for one week to produce a solution; out of their comfort zone and forced to step out of their traditional roles.