"School of Future"

Our school named "Realschule Sundern" in Germany was certified and honoured by members of the State's Ministry last Friday, 20th March 2015, for the third successive time. The school is now allowed to call itself "School of Future" again.

"School of Future" ambassadors from our school.

During a ceremony at a school in Marsberg, Germany, Pia, Noelle, Almedina, Leonie and Sophie as well as Marie and me as their teacher went to the stage to receive the certificates, door plates for the school and a flag from the President of the State's Ministry of Environmental Affairs, Mr. Thomas Delschen, from Ferdi Lenze, vize county commissioner and from Martina Nolte, schools inspector of the county.

Walking on the stage, they received the certificate
and all the other pleasant things

The honoured schools themselves prepared this ceremony with music and dancing performances. That morning 26 schools and 25 partner institutes in our county were honoured for their educational work. Mentioning the main idea "learning within networks" the jury certified those schools and partners which had taken strong effords to realize this main idea at their school and institutes between 2012 and 2015 successfully. Years ago already there was set up a network in our county named "commonly active in the HSK" (HSK: the abbreviation of our county: Hochsauerlandkreis). This network had been build up out of schools and extracurricular education providers. They have offered certain services for schools to educate the students outside the regular classes at school.

These 6 ladies were representing lots of students at our school,
working and learning within networks.

Education for global sustainable development  at different aspects will be successful only, if the youth today (who will be the adults from tomorrow!) will be educated with additional experts, learning in networks. To discuss global problems and to search for common solutions of these and to motivate teachers, students and whole classes for sustainable development successfully. This was our task to express with our contribution to be honoured finally.

Originally created by our students' radio station "Radio Rasant" where students from different countries are collaborating to prepare common radio transmissions, this idea has been spread around at our school meanwhile and has already reached several classes and subjects at different levels.

from the right: Stefanie Horn, Dr. Thomas Delschen,
Martina Nolte, Ferdi Lenze, Reinhard Marx

That is the reason why we could present the "Radio Rasant" project last Friday as well as the "Lunchboxproject" as a second example we did last year already (some of you might remember about that!) for the second time.  Students from Nepal, Australia, India, the USA, Indonesia, Taiwan, Brazil, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Russia and students from grade 7 at our school took pictures from their lunchboxes, presented them by videoconferencing to their partners and discussed aspects of nutrition and food shortage.

They took their chance to record some interviews.

All schools got the chance to present their projects at a little exhibition straight before the ceremony started. Interested teachers from everywhere in our county and members of the extracurricular providers were walking around and got a lot of information about collaboration at our school, mentioning HLW- Skypers and other networks we use to get in touch with other classes and teachers from abroad. Finally we also mentioned this excellent opportunities to implement English language into another subject.



The state's campagne to strengthen sustainable development education at schools will go on. And we will go on teaching using learning networks with teachers, students and experts from abroad. More than 400 teachers and experts are connected to our school meanwhile. Thank you very much to all of you who have supported us doing this extraordinary kind of learning.