Beyond Borders: BUDDİES not BULLIES.

We, the partners, applied for this project because while we were working on the eTwinning project with the same topic we discovered that peer bullying is a common problem and harms behaviour and mental development. Since students start their social life at kindergarten and school after their families, we concluded that there is some undesirable behaviour among our students. The pandemic period made things worse because the students were frequently in cyberbullying situations on both social media and digital gaming platforms. The information is based on the Questionnaire we created at the end of the eTwinning project. Afterwards, we had evaluation meetings to determine the needs of our schools and the areas we need to improve to make our students save.

We wanted to show the importance of raising awareness of peer bullying and cyberbullying, to understand it correctly and take necessary precautions and develop feasible intervention programmes to prevent bullying in our schools. For every intentional and unintentional peer bullying, we aimed to eliminate the students' complaints, to guide them, to increase their interest in school, to increase their motivation, to create an atmosphere of tolerance among them, to encourage them to develop an attitude toward bullying, to increase awareness and teacher them respect, to create a democratic class and remove disadvantages, to contribute to the spiritual development of our students. In all this the inclusion of their families and the collaboration were vital. What is more, we wanted to take the best from all three educational systems to achieve the goals of the projects and get a high-quality and effective solution. Our main goal was to increase the self-confidence of our students and to develop empathy skills.

Through this project, we had many activities and here they are: presentation of the host school, logo creation and selection, each country presentation, theatre show on bullying and developing empathy concluded with a Kahoot quiz, group sports games to reduce peer bullying, local dance in mixed groups, quiz hunt game in mixed groups, presentations of the schools, workshop on cyberbullying, working on ebook and magazine about cyberbullying, safely using social media, role-playing and information sharing activities. In all these activities the main goals were shared with the host school and the partner schools, as well. The activities were student-centred and technology-supported. At the end of each mobility, we had a dissemination and evaluation meeting with all the participants to see if the goal had been achieved.

Our students became aware of every aspect of bullying and cyberbullying. Most of the aspects were unknown to them by that point. Many of them hadn't realized that they were bullied at some point in their life. By being aware of these aspects, they became intolerable of any kind of bullying, they memorized the action plan for what to do and when and how. Because of the strong international cooperation between our schools, we can say that our goals are achieved.