Osnovna skola Horvati - Osnovna skola Horvati

Primary School Horvati (Osnovna škola Horvati) was founded in 1897. and has had long history and tradition. It is one of the oldest schools in Zagreb. This public school has over three hundred students, age 6-15, classified into 4 upper and 4 lower grades (292 students).

We take pride in providing safe (UNICEF program – school without violence)  and challenging environment for our students. Besides regular classes, students can choose different elective subjects and extracurricular activities. We take pride in qualified, highly motivated teaching staff.

Primary School Horvati was awarded by City of Zagreb for contribution to development of educational process.

In our school, during the eight years of education, students have a long line of studies.

Also, the school is well known and takes great pride for its successful inclusion of students with special needs (especially cerebral palsy), who participate in all the lessons according to the adjusted curriculum.  Teachers, medical staff and personal assistants regularly help them.

Our students actively take part in various projects and interest groups such as EU projects participation and videoconferences.

The school gives special support to these kinds of projects that involve improvement of teaching methods, IT and knowledge of foreign languages because they have a positive impact on children’s everyday life abilities of administrating their lives and has an influence on local development.

We have experience in usage of WEB 2.0 tools and we were involved in creating and testing new teaching methodology AMORES (EU funded) project for motivating children to read. We try to encourage collaborative learning and problem solving lessons whenever it is possible. All of our teachers are qualified (collage degree) and few of our teachers have been promoted  (mentors, counselor, PhD graduates, a Code Ambassador, Go-Lab teacher, expert in using and creating digital materials for students and teachers…).  They go to training courses on a regular basis. We are proud that large number of them were involved in a different projects (EU, e-twinning, national ones…).

The school has deepened its experience in management, training and use of ICT in educational contexts, self-assessment and the horizontal and vertical curriculum articulation, as well as the integral development of the student in particular of multiple intelligences and skills for the XXI century.

We have experience with creating stories and some experience in story-telling. We have experience with e-twinning projects and creating and running a blog in English.

The children are able to feel confident to use technical language and concepts such as organizing, sorting, predicting, debugging, decomposition and abstraction. Children understand networks, the web and the internet.

Primary school Horvati school has employees who, although working in inadequate conditions are always willing to learn and change their approach to teaching. We believe it is very important to be the teacher with 21st century skills in order to teach 21st century students. Since the school has been well known for creating inclusive environment for students with special needs, we believe that the school staff needs lifelong training. By self-assessment we have identified areas where, as the school, we should achieve even greater improvements. The improvement of basic competences and skills, as well as the quality of teaching (regarding especially the basic skills of the weaker students of our school), is necessary for the successful educational process. We also think that we need to encourage higher quality and excellence in innovation and internationalization of the school in terms of education and training (particularly the use of new teaching methods, ICT in the digital classroom, the STEM field). One of our goals is certainly to improve the international dimension of education and training in our school.

Croatia, as a country, in this moment, is in the middle of the new school reform project. We are trying to change direction on a national level: new ways of teaching, creativity in teaching, new ways of of work evaluation, revision of subject curriculums - trying to lose unnecessary themes, development of critical thinking, logical way of thinking and coming to conclusions, teacher authonomy in choosing the teaching methods, getting students more active.

We have basic technology resources, but unfortunately our IT equipment doesn’t match our ambitions in aspect of introducing new teaching methods.

We have a very good cooperation with local community and with some organizations that address needs of children with special needs and children in general.

We are taking part in different projects for years. We are among few leading schools in Croatia in using videoconferencing in teaching. During last few years we have increased usage of ICT tools in teaching, at the same time we are educating students and parents about Internet safety.  We have also been involved in a number of training and projects in developing adjusted and individualized teaching plans and programs. We are trying to build and find new ways for inclusion of children with special needs (during the process we are cooperating with organizations that address that sort of problems). Our teachers are involved in all segments of Croatian educational system (organization of principals, e-twinning ambassador, leader of regional teacher training, mentors, active involvement in school reform, mentors in national school subject competitions etc.). All the mentioned things guarantee our motivation for school improvement in the part of using new methodologies and their implementation in regular teaching and it also gives an excellent base and opportunity for project results disseminations. With every new cooperation or project we improve our skills and technology conditions which still isn’t on the optimal level.

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We were partners in a AMORES project that ended this year. We helped to create new teaching metodology (ICT and literature) which was key result of the project.

We are pioneers in using videoconfernce in teaching and by that we are well recognized in Croatia. We have some bilateral cooperations with schools in country and abroad. We take part in different projects (like the TIME project) and by that students use knowlege from different teaching fields, subjects, themes, they use differnet skills and competences. Our students and their parents got used to our implemntation of modern teaching methods and improvement on a regular basis and it is expected from us to continue with that in the future. 

We use different ICT tools for communication (like Edmodo)., sharing digital documents (like Google docs), making presentations (like Prezi), making interactive posters (like Glogster), comics (like Pixton).

We have experience in the project management and financial management.

Our teachers work very hard and in an innovative way to develop ICT comepetences of the students. We have a robotics group in our school for the last few years.

Through e-learning, Comenius (Erasmus+) projects and videoconferences our students will improve their knowledge, meet other countries and gain lots of friends from all over the world, friends who could eventually become their future business partners.

As a partner we have participated  very successfully  in Comenius projects "Europe Anim´Action" , "Young Europeans say: break walls, be tolerant!" , An Approach to Motivating learners to Read in European Schools  and IPA project called Snail in school. Also we are GLOBE school and part of ISE and ODS projects. Now we are in Erasmus+ K1 project for teachers.

Through these the school has managed to get positive feedback, opportunities to network with other schools, ideas for projects and teaching interventions.

In the  last eight years we had many videoconferences with students from all over the world; USA, Canada, China, France, Portugal, UK and much more. Students from 1st to 8th grades are involved in the videoconferences and we are very proud of that.

We are very opened to the world because we think it is very important for students to be students of the world. Their teacher must be the one who will show them the first step to achieve that goal.

Students have need for learning in a more fun and effective way, to improve their language, communication and digital skills, for developing skills for collaborative learning. Teachers have need for using new teaching methods, which make lessons and teaching goals easier to achieve. They want to get students more motivated and to develop a larger interest for the subjects. Institutional need is to develop a human potential of the teachers.