Monday, 21 May 2018:
Arrival of the teams. The teams went to the hotel the teachers were staying at and the guest-families picked up their students there. Due to the late arrival of the teams and the fact that Monday was a national holiday, no further actions were taken that day.
Tuesday, 22 May 2018:
Schools were closed that day, including HAK Wolfsberg. However, we found an alternative location for our introductory activities – The InspireLab at the Lakeside Park in Klagenfurt. The Lakeside Park is a collection of buildings housing mostly businesses and Start-Ups but also restaurants and a bi-lingual kinder-garden. The InspireLab is a large room designed to serve as a creative and educational environment for students and pupils alike. Schools have the possibility to reserve and use the room for projects and special occasions such as our first morning together.
The students and teachers were taken from Wolfsberg to Klagenfurt by bus and arrived at 09:00 am. After settling down at the Inspire Lab, we commenced our first activity which involved the students talking to each other, trying to find out a few things about one another and then present a student from a different country to the rest of the group. Since our project involves creating our own albeit fictive businesses we invited the founder of the Startup SlyDec Mr Harald Saupper to tell our guests about the process of starting a business. The talk focused on the questions young entrepreneurs have to ask themselves and answer during the course of starting an enterprise.
After a coffee-break and some refreshments we went on to visit a local restaurant. The visit was not just of the culinary kind, however, as Magda’s (which is a name but at the same time means ‘like-that’) is a business very similar to what our project intends for our fictive enterprises to be. While providing a normal service to guests, the restaurant focuses on providing training to become kitchen-assistants and waiting-staff for people who otherwise have difficulties finding a job. After finishing the training these staff move on to find a permanent position at a gastronomical business in the region or beyond.
We were greeted by Magda’s coordinator Frau Christina Staubmann who provided us with all the interesting and necessary details about the restaurant in a concise presentation. However, as it was lunchtime and since we were at a restaurant we of course had to treat our taste buds with some of the delicious food on offer.
To conclude our day at the regional capital we took a walk through the center of Klagenfurt, having our teachers explaining facts and stories about the old-town and some of its monuments.
After the bus ride home, our students were picked up by their host families where they spent the evening.
Wednesday, 23 May 2018:
Finally it was time to welcome the teams at our school. At 07:45 the teams arrived and were shown around our premises. In the staff-room our teams were welcomed by all the teachers and our headmaster while the students accompanied their host-children to their respective class-rooms. Shortly thereafter we gathered the whole school at our main event-hall to officially welcome our Erasmus+ guests. After some introductions and short speeches by politicians and representatives of local businesses, it was time to let the students come on the stage and present their countries, regions and schools to our own as well as the international students. The excitement took its toll and it was time to strengthen teachers and students alike in order to be prepared for the hard work to follow.
We gathered our Erasmus+ teams at our Erasmus-room to start working on our project. All the teams were asked to prepare a short presentation as well as parts of the business-plan needed to start our businesses. The introductory workshop was done at the first LTA in Sao Joao da Madeira, Portugal in March 2018. Building on the knowledge gathered there, the students were able to present business ideas as well as details to be included in the business-plan. Our round of presentations helped our students get a better idea about what the businesses could look like and what the other teams had come up with.
Having finished our presentations, we had the respective groups gather and use one of several computers to work out the business-plan in more detail. All the time they were accompanied and guided by our own students and teachers in order to help with any questions and issues concerning any of the points that needed to be worked out.
Lunch was held at school at another room prepared specifically for that. Afterwards we got on a bus and went to visit a local business specializing in wood. The reason we visited the business was the fact that they do a lot of sponsoring of local social enterprises and focus their work also on supporting local businesses.
After our return to school, the students once again spent their evening at the host-families’ homes.
Thursday, 24 May 2018:
On Thursday morning we started straight with our work on the business plan, organized the same way as the day before since all the teams were happy to have our ‘experts’ helping them with their business-plans. After a coffee-break, the Spanish team held a workshop on marketing in relation to starting one’s own business. The workshop also included an introduction to and the use of an app to create one’s own business-specific app oneself.
Before lunch, we were delighted to welcome clients of a local business called ‘Lebenshilfe’ (Lifehelp) that focuses on caring for people with disabilities. This day is always organized by our second grade classes and this year we were happy to revolve the activities around our Erasmus+ guests. We prepared different activities around the court-yard of the school. Every station was organized and managed by our guest-students with our own students helping out in case the language-barriers became too big. The Lebenshilfe clients could participate in the activities provided and get stamps on their ‘EU-passport’. All the activities revolved around getting to know different cultures and living the idea of a united and social Europe. The activities were concluded by a barbecue in the court-yard where our students once again had the chance to mingle and get to know each other.
Our day came to a finish after visiting the ‘Haus der Regionen’, a center that provides space for local businesses to present and sell their products in the heart of the old-town of Wolfsberg.
Friday, 25 May 2018:
Friday, our last day at the school, again, started with another workshop. This time, since the workflow on the previous days was superb, the students already worked on the finishing touches on the business-plan in order to get it ready while they still had expert help at their hands.
After a busy morning, and because we had an evening-program planned, the students were granted a break and the teachers had a meeting and lunch together at school.
The evening program was a dinner and get-together of the students, teachers and host-families on a mountain hut close to Wolfsberg. There it was also time to present our guest-students with gifts – T-Shirts to be personalized together with their new friends.
Saturday, 26 May 2018:
In the morning it was time to hand over all the certificates and take some final pictures with our headmaster. Then it was off on the bus to Graz, the regional capital of Styria. Before we headed into the center we visited a chocolate-factory close to the city. ‘Zotter’ is a chocolate manufacturer famous for being one of the first businesses in Austria to sell 100% FairTrade products. The company focuses on improving the lives of the chocolate farmers in developing countries and to keep their carbon footprint as low as possible. It was another good example of a social business that inspired our students.
After visiting the historic center of Graz it was time to say goodbye to the Czech and the Greek team as their train and flight left from Graz the next day. For the rest of us it was back to Wolfsberg where everyone enjoyed a last evening together before we had to say goodbye on the following morning.
Goals:
The goal of this LTA was to provide a group of students with the possibilities to interact and get to know a different country and culture as well as its educational system. Furthermore, since the HAK Wolfsberg is a business-school the aim was to work on and finish each country’s business-plan.
The primary goal for the project-week as such was to work on and finish the business-plans needed in order to ‘start’ the teams’ businesses and to use the time at the business-school as productively as possible.
The goal of the social work was to allow for contact and interaction with people with disabilities and to provide them with an entertaining and interesting day getting to know students from all over Europe.
The goal of the marketing-workshop was to give students an idea of what marketing entails and what that might mean for their specific business in order to keep working on that aspect during the 3rd LTA in Spain in October 2018.
The goal of the IT-workshop was to give the students the opportunity to create their own apps and use them as a marketing-tool for their businesses.