EBI Francisco Ferreira Drummond

Our school was founded in September 2011 and provides formal education for pupils from 3 to 14-15 years old. It is located in a rural community in Terceira Island, the Azores, Portugal, halfway between the two main cities of the island, where people, in general, work in agriculture and farming. Besides being in an outermost region of Europe, our school is also far from mainstream cultural events in the island. The educational counterpart of this landscape is a below-average performance concerning school marks. The school has about 600 hundred pupils, 80 teachers, and 50 other staff members, and is currently working hard to reshape its place in the educational framework of the Azores: we are trying to increase the usage of online platforms, to learn how to produce and share educational projects within the school and with partner schools, we are testing a media classroom with tablets, and we are also participating in a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) programme, and we applied for a national Project of curricular autonomy and flexibility (PAFC) so that we can have some degree of autonomy to combine different classes, subjects, and teachers, to work in a Project Based Learning approach to learning. We also invested a lot of our energies and expertise in European projects, namely Erasmus+ projects, as a strategy to get the school familiarized with innovative practices in education and to endorse them in their daily activities. Besides all this, we also applied and succeeded in becoming a UNESCO ASPnet School, which grants us first-hand information about international projects and allow us to join most of them, thus being connected to a wide world education network. Our school is nowadays an experienced and reliable Erasmus+ partner taking advantage of his former experience in designing, developing and evaluating several Erasmus + projects.