The 30th anniversary of the Time Project: A Project That Holds a Special Place in My Teaching Practice

 If you are a fan of videoconferences and online projects, then you must have heard of the Time Project.

This year, this fantastic project marked its 30th anniversary. To learn more about the project itself, simply visit their official website. And while the project did mark its 30th anniversary, I have to say that for me it was a big 10.

The first time I joined the project was in 2015, and since then—together with my students from Croatia and now with students from the international European School Brussels I—I have been a proud member of this great team of teachers who aim to bring students together in a 24-hour worldwide event to discuss, research, and share topics relevant to them and to the world.

On 28 November 2025, 18 EEB1 students once again took part in the TIME Project for the third year in a row, marking a special milestone, as 2025, as mentioned before, was the 30th anniversary of the event. For our students, however, it was even more special, as we achieved 4th place in the Unite the Nations Quiz, representing Belgium out of more than 20 schools from 11 countries worldwide. This is so far the best result our students have achieved since joining the project in November 2023. Read more on the project’s official website.

                                                (TP certificate presented to the EEB1 school)

Throughout the day, besides researching and answering questions for the UN quiz, students engaged in House of Commons debates, presentations, and discussions with peers from across the world. They actively shared their opinions and demonstrated strong listening and communication skills on this year’s UN SDG topics, such as Responsible Consumption and Production, Mental Health and Wellbeing, and Sustainable Cities.

This year, we travelled online to seven different schools from Turkey, Croatia, India, Poland, Canada, and Taiwan.

                                     

This experience once again holds a special place for me and my students, as I still remember 2015 and the first group of enthusiastic students from my secondary school in Croatia, who worked for hours from 1 a.m. on the UN quiz, took part in dozens of videoconferences, joked, laughed, slept in school corridors, and still to this day remember the Time Project as one of the best experiences they had during their secondary education.

Some of them are now married and have become teachers themselves, so maybe in the near future they will join this remarkable event!

I myself will continue to promote the project among EEB1 students and bring them joy, experience, and sense of unity that such projects create. They bring out the best in our students: they teach collaboration, teamwork, tolerance, and flexibility, and sometimes we teachers are positively surprised by their improvisation. Most of all, we love seeing our students grow in confidence.

So, see you all next year for the 31st Time Project which will be held on 27 November so MARK the DATE!! :)

StudentsmeetCRO

Pinterest board - Safety Online

Primjer kreiranja Pinterest ploče - pinterest board!

Pinterest Board - Safety Online - CARNet MOOC

Moodle MOOT Online Conference 5- 7 August 2016

Even though many educators tend to enjoy their holidays and have a free time from school and lectures, there are still those who apart from taking time off and enjoying their vacation still like to work on their personal development. I am no exception!

This year I participated in a 3 day free online conference MMVC16 organized by Nellie Deutsch. It was not my first time, but I never took the time to reflect upon the many webinars I watched LIVE or took the pleasure in listening the recordings.

I joined the Moodle  MMVC16 platform and had the pleasure of participating in several LIVE webinars held by many of my dear colleagues, but I also had the time to watch few recordings.

I mainly chose the webinars that were of my interest at this point in my teaching career and these webinars will have quite an influence in my teaching practice.

The list of the webinars and my reflections are avaliable in the presentation below.

LINK to Google Slides

Creative Storytelling by students of 4.b by Students of 4.b Gimnazija Ogulin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Time Project - 24 hours online event for students worldwide

Time Project Selfie Commemorative Banner

On 27 November 2015 I had the pleasure to organize a Time Project Day in our secondary school of Gimnazija Bernardina Frankopana; an intercultural 24 hours online event for students worldwide. This was Time Project's 20th anniversary and it was the first time for our school to participate in this event. There were 17 students (15-18 years of age) and 2 teachers from our school who wanted to be a part of various activities organized by the Time Headquarters. 

Time project school team - 2015

Our school participated in Pre-Selfie Activity, Videoconferences and "Unite the Nations" quiz. It was a fantastic experience for both students and teachers with more than 10 video conferences with students from Canada, India, Indonesia, Russia, Netherlands, Turkey, Colombia. The Time Project day started at 1.00 am in our Croatian local time and it was fun to see the time zone differences.

If you want to participate in the next year's Time Project Event learn more about it on Time Project official website.

Here is a short Animoto video clip of this year's Time Project event held in our school.

                               

Our students really had a great time and here is the article written by one of our girls who describes the projects experience and her joy of winning the 5th place in answering Unite the Nations" quiz questions. It is a true student's point of view and I hope it will inspire your students and you to join us next year on December 2nd 2016 for yet another - 21st Time Project Event!

DORA'S TIME PROJECT EXPERIENCE!

For the 20th time, The Time Project was held worldwide. Out of 80 schools that participated in this project, even two Croatian schools made it to the top five, and our school, Gimnazija Bernardina Frankopana, took the fifth place. As a group, we are very happy of our achievement, because it is in fact, our first time participating in this project.

You'd think that staying inside your school the whole night would give you goosebumps, but it didn't though, the school only looks scary at daytime, with all the professors around, but at night(and with great company) it is just fine. We all gathered at the entrance around 1 am and settled ourselves in PASCH. In a flash, we got our laptops out and went online in the classroom(I finally got the password!). 

Everyone was told to bring some snacks and something to drink with them, so we put all of it on the „sacred table of foods“ we were to eat from the whole night. Our professor gave us our assignments with certain country's questions that we had to answer until the next morning. We were also split into two groups: one group was supposed to have video conferences with many students from other countries and the other one was to answer the questions about these foreign countries. 

Distributing tasks

We had to answer 325 questions in total, and I must say that Taiwan really gave us a headache. I'm not even sure if we answered all of their questions. After we had gotten our assignments, we all settled down in our own corners, some working in groups and some being lone wolves. Anyway, the first coffee of the night was made in an instant, but „mister my coffee must be perfect“ didn't quite like it, so we gave it another shot. In the end, the coffee was fine, but because of a reason I am not supposed to share here, the coffee was gone around 3am. I, myself, had fallen asleep by 4 am. My „beloved“ friends with whom I was to share the pain of not having any caffeine, tried to pull me out of the classroom, along with my mattress, so I would wake up in the hallway. They failed because I had entangled my legs around the table legs I was sleeping next to. (I was working on my assignment on that little table in The PASCH classroom and I was basically sitting on the floor and my legs were under the table so I guess you get the picture). I must say that their disappointment made me question our friendship, hahaha. After I woke up, I continued to work on my assignment just like everyone else had been doing while I was asleep. The morning was close to come when we were almost done with our answers. Some of the guys went to get us coffee around 7 am and that coffee saved me from passing out (I am very weak, I know). By the time we finished, we were all a bit grumpy and were teasing the group that was having video conferences. We would wave our hands in front of the camera or just stand in the background and grin like idiots. 

                    

Some just loved to have fun as well!

The last video conference was the best(they do say sugar comes at the end) and if I am not mistaken, it was a video chat with Netherlands. Our and their groups started talking about politics and it was really interesting to listen to them go on about the global problems. If we had people sitting in the government like these guys, we wouldn't have any issues. Unfortunately, the chat was finished and we started packing our things. The day was Friday and it was 12 pm. The 20th Time Project was officially over for our school. We had 10 video conferences with students from 6 different countries in less than 10 hours. I think I would call this a SUCCESS and teacher Smolčec says it very often. After that inspiring night we just went home to get some sleep.

Even though nobody got any rest that night, we all had great fun and I think that this really connected us to youngsters just like us all around the globe. This was truly a wonderful experience and I hope this project will carry on in our school in the years to come and that the next generations will experience the same sense of unity we had felt that night. I just hope that Mrs Smolčec will carry on with this and that she will also agree to have me next year.                                                  (Dora H. - age 15)

The last memorable selfie - one of many taken during the event.

Teachers with their great students!

Toondoo Comic book about Honey

Exploring the way of Creating ToonDoo Comic Books and embeding them into websites

about bees and honey by msmolcec | Make your own at www.toondoo.com