Open Vilnius

Goal

Learning can happen anywhere. The city is full of spaces, businesses and institutions that can enrich and deepen the learning experience, which is why we aim to turn Vilnius into one big school.

We encourage schools to combine traditional classroom lessons with lessons in the capital's public spaces. This combination gives more freedom for students' individual creativity, arouses curiosity and motivates them, as knowledge is immediately linked to experience, subjects are integrated and universal skills are developed.

Description

The platform www.vilniusyramokykla.lt provides ideas and lesson plans, itineraries for integrated activities, and spaces and lessons offered by institutions and companies in Vilnius.

Streets and parks, architecture and urban planning, museums and galleries, institutions and businesses - Vilnius opens up and becomes a school for all teachers and students in the capital.

Teachers, businesses, institutions, organisations are invited to give the capital's pupils a lesson!

Biology, physics and chemistry lessons can take place in state-of-the-art laboratories in Vilnius. Museums and galleries offer history and art education. Pupils can go to the cinema to watch films in the original language and develop their language skills. In this way, knowledge is immediately linked to experience, subjects are integrated and curiosity and motivation to learn grow.

But the platform is not the only activity of the 3-year project. In addition, training for teachers and a methodology to facilitate the integration of out-of-school learning into the general education curriculum are also planned.

Achievements in 2023

For a year now, www.vilniusyramokykla.lt has been successfully running - the first of its kind!

Almost 3 000 teachers have already joined the platform.
Around 300 unique lessons and almost 30 spaces have been uploaded.
More than 4,000 students have visited the lessons taking place in the institutions.
We have almost 100 partners.
Lessons have been downloaded 28 000 times from the platform.
The platform has added a life skills section and adapted programmes for pupils with special educational needs. 
The platform also includes a teacher training plugin to simplify the management of event registrations and certification. 

All 111 schools under the Vilnius City Municipality have now received the guide.

70 teachers have completed the Vilnius is a School 40-academic-hour in-service training programme, which aims to help teachers organise their lessons more smoothly outside school.
During the year, teachers also developed lessons, tested the guide and participated in a focus group to improve the platform.

The idea won the national selection round of Skaitmeninis Knygnešys competition as the best digital solution of the year in the category "Learning and Education".

Vilnius is a school attracted media interest in Portugal, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.
With the growing interest from abroad, we also launched a representative website www.vilniusisaschool.com

For the first time, representatives of the winners of the global Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayoral Challenge met in Venice, and the project's curators and supporters were able to visit Vilnius to participate in the lessons offered by the platform and to meet with representatives of business and educational institutions.

Vilnius is a School project and the lessons provided by the State Patent Office of the Republic of Lithuania are featured in the recent WIPO CEBS newsletter.

Project partners: Vilnius City Municipality, institutions, companies and organisations located in the capital.

The project is implemented with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies' Global Mayors Challenge.

Contact

Project manager Snieguolė Kavoliūnienė
Snieguole.Kavoliuniene@vilnius.lt

Goal

The world is full of complex problems, such as climate warming and social inequalities, and the only way to learn how to tackle such complex challenges is... by learning from a young age.

Description

Phenomenon-based education is one of the Finnish methods of creativity education, involving students in exploring relevant phenomena, asking questions and finding solutions.  It is a method that proposes to look at a life scenario, a contemporary problem or a natural phenomenon as a starting point for learning. An education that is action-oriented and an active, learning person who seeks to make a difference in the world. For this reason, asking the right questions and opening them up to a perspective that relates global phenomena to our own experience is key to a new understanding of learning.

Starting in spring 2022, training is being organised to introduce school communities to the theoretical aspects of such education, to better understand the meanings and values of such education, and to empower them to put phenomenon-based education into practice.

The aim of the training is to provide school community representatives (teachers, administrators, other professionals) with knowledge of the basic theoretical and practical assumptions of phenomenon-based education and to train them to apply phenomenon-based education in school practice.

Achievements in 2023

In 2023, 10 schools in Vilnius tested phenomenon-based education.
130 teachers took part in the programme. 91 of them were trained in the methodology of phenomenon-based education and put it into practice, while 39 teachers received only theoretical training.

Contact

Project manager Asta Morkūnienė
Asta.Morkuniene@vilnius.lt

Goal

Cultural education not only helps to develop creativity and knowledge of one's own culture, but is also seen as a way to build links between people and shape society and its identity. 

For some children, school is the only one that helps them to learn about culture, which is why in Vilnius we aim to contribute to the cultural education of pupils from a very young age.

Description

Throughout the school year, we invite students and teachers in Vilnius City to be active and use the digital badges-keys introduced in the Cultural Education System, which Edu Vilnius has contributed to the development of. 

From September 2023 onwards, each month will highlight a different badge-key and showcase the activities taking place in Vilnius City that correspond to its competences.  

In addition to badges, teachers are invited to register their classroom achievements, which are rewarded with visits to cultural and educational activities. In this way, we encourage cultural learning to become an integral, permanent part of education.

Contact

Project manager Rūta Lazauskaitė
Ruta.Lazauskaite@vilnius.lt