Many people worked tirelessly for this project to become real. Most of all, our very dear coordinator Hacer gave her heart when writing the project. She treats it with love and tends to it passionately and with the outmost care. We and our student worked for a year on the eTwinning project and in March 2019, Hacer applied for the Erasmus+ funding.
We always stayed in touch no matter what, and I remember when months later, on 24th July, I received the message in our Whatsapp group that the project had been approved. I was having a great time on holiday and that message made it even better. I still keep it on my phone We were all thrilled and over the moon that we were given the opportunity to finally meet each other, so that we could continue on this wonderful journey called FUSION.
Coordinators continued communicating with each other. We discussed our future steps and arranged the first meeting in Ankara, Turkey, in November 2019. We were all eager to meet each other and we finally did on the 25th of November. We spent all week working and learning new web tools and most importantly connecting with one another. It was a week filled with new experiences, new friendships were made, new things were learnt. We laughed a lot and while being introduced to Turkish culture, cuisine and tradition, what made the biggest impression was the Turkish hospitality and the loving and caring nature of the people we met. After a week spent together, we all left with joy in our hearts that we will meet again in February in North Macedonia.
It was my outmost pleasure to host my dear friends and partners when they came to our school. Among all the work and all the trainings, the teachers had, we all learnt new web tools that will help us with our work and that is, when educating some very brilliant young people. None of us could have imagined just how important that will become in the months to follow. I was more than happy that I could show some of the most beautiful places my country has to offer to my very dear guests. If only we all had known that this meeting would be the last one for this year. But none of us did, and none of us could have predicted what would happen just 2 weeks after they all went home.
On 11th March WHO announced COVID-19 a pandemic and all countries closed their borders one after another. The whole world went into a lockdown. It was, and still is unbelievable how fast everything happened. Despite all the difficulties and all the challenges we had to face in our everyday life, we still continued working on FUSION and communicating on a regular basis. Because FUSION is no longer just another Erasmus+ project. FUSION is friendship, love and care. FUSION is FAMILY. And what do you do when you can’t go and see your family? You meet online, and you talk and support each other.
So, ever since the pandemic happened we met online regularly. Maybe a lot of things stopped or better said, were forced to stop, but a teacher’s enthusiasm is not something that has the pause button
OUR ONLINE MEETINGS
In order to discuss our further steps, we met online 6 times in 2020.
1. 26.03.2020 – Our first online meeting was in March just 2 weeks after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. We all saw the importance of us meeting and we scheduled one as soon as we could. During the meeting we talked how we can adapt to the new situation that we all had found ourselves in. We all agreed that we need to continue with the activities written in the application, with some slight variations because of the virus. It was also decided that regular online meetings are crucial for the project and the more frequent the communication between us is, the better the results at the end will be.
2. 23.04.2020 – During this meeting we decided that we are going to create an acrostic poem about the Corona virus confinement. We talked about working on the robotics dictionary and decided how to distribute the words and terms that are to be translated, among the partners. A decision was made that every country will create a poster for only one letter of FUSION and all of those posters will later be put together. We scheduled another meeting for May.
3. 07.05.2020 – Our acrostic poem was completed and published on social media. Also the posters were created and put together. During this meeting we talked about the possibility of travelling from September. We also discussed and planned our future activities, which included sports videos and how our students are staying active during the lockdown. We decide to create one joint video about the sports activities.
4. 30.06.2020 – As promised we continued meeting regularly and this was our last meeting before the summer break. The robotics dictionary was completed and a decision was made to wait until the end of August before planning anything else. We wished each other a nice and peaceful summer promising to meet again in 2 months.
5. 31.08.2020 – After the summer break this was our first meeting. As decided before, we waited until August to see what the situation would be like and whether or not we can plan our mobility to Spain. But unfortunately at that time, travelling was still not possible, so we decide to postpone it. We talked about what we are going to do this school year and we planned some of the activities for the teachers and the students. We decided to meet again in September.
6. 28.09.2020 – This will be our “last” meeting for 2020. “Last” because we decided that for this year’s celebration of Erasmus Days we are all going to organize a joint webinar on 15th October. Each of the coordinators are going to present a web tool that other teachers will find it very useful for the online teaching. Every partner decided which tool they are going to present during the webinar and we invited all of the teachers from our schools. We also decided how we are going to celebrate Erasmus Days within our schools.
STAYING IN TOUCH FOR US IS VERY IMPORTANT. IT’S WHAT HELPS US GET THROUGH THESE CHALLENGING TIMES. HOPEFULLY IN 2021 WE WILL BE ABLE TO MEET OUR FUSION FAMILY AGAIN. UNTIL THEN, STAY SAFE WITH LOTS OF LOVE IN YOUR HEARTS!!!
