Creation of Digital Environments for Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Creation of Digital Environments for Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Research and innovation; Open and distance learning; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The European Commission’s Rethinking Education initiative has identified the need ‘to scale-up use of ICT in learning and teaching’ to exploit the opportunities that the digital revolution presents for enhancing education. It calls for innovation, work to define ‘how, when and where ICT can be used effectively in pedagogical and assessment approaches’ and activities to support teachers and learners to increase their digital competence. We tried to do our best to ensure the appropriate environment for our students to gain the mentioned targets but we needed to do something in a wider perspective, with a bigger scale. Hence the idea of CODE-E had emerged and nourished from this critical need.
We sticked to the goal of “enhancing the quality and relevance of the learning offer in education, training and youth work by developing new and innovative approaches and supporting the dissemination of best practices”. The partnership that was led by Sarıyer Ortaokulu, formed a Strategic Partnership of pedagogical parties with the aim of further developing, trialling, evaluating and disseminating a novel framework for ‘creating knowledge and solving conceptual problems with the support of digital tools’ (cf. the digital competence of the same name identified in EC DIGCOMP).
We have applied the principles and tools for a computing practice that enables educators and learners to collaborate in creating live interactive resources that serve as personal, shareable understandings. Such a practice has been more accessible than conventional computing practices but more expressive and powerful. Its adoption has lead to the online development of open educational resources that can be flexibly modified by educators and learners alike to give support for blending educational practices, combining instruction and construction. The partnership let the project to draw on a unique blend of skills and experience, and to access opportunities through two learning activities. The partner organizations had had a different degree of experience and each country had embeded coding into cirriculums with different aspects of the practice in and out of the classroom, therefore we have used these variety of focal points to enrich the project experience for all the partners and participants. We all utilized the different focal points and exercises that we have applied in different educational environments with different backgrounds. Sarıyer Ortaokulu started with 6 teachers and 30 students in the beginning but in the second year of the project about 180 students received coding classes in 6 different groups after school hours. 12 students joined the LTT activities in 2 different countries but the whole coding club received the training they had received after the LTT visits. This year the coding classes are going on with about 200 hundred students with the support of the parents and the school. The widespread awareness about the advantages of coding literacy has been so fruitful that we plan to keep the classes and enable more and more students have the opportunity to receive same kind of education in a public school which is still exceptionally rare in Turkey.
The principal objective of our project was to promote code writing as a relatively new practice that promises to support teachers and learners to create knowledge and solve conceptual problems with the support of digital tools. As the framework had had the potential to address significant objectives, challenges and needs relevant to several fields of education, our proposal was to form a Strategic Partnership covering more than one field.
The core activities of the Strategic Partnership was to be and has had been to:
• Develop and refine the existing cirriculum and tools, drawing on the pedagogical and technical experiences of our partnership thorough the project activities. We have written our own cirriculum adopting the existing cirriculums to our specific student profiles, needs, trainers’ objectives counting on our three-term teaching experiences with our students.
• Apply the cirriculum in some specific educational contexts with a range of learners to explore and test its potential to enhance the teaching of computing/programming and other subjects. We have used our own cirriculum in different subjects with different age group students and test the usabilty and sustainability of the teaching materials that we have prepared and developed them according to our students’ needs. We have produced a report under the light of our experiences.
• Refine the framework and tools in light of its application in educational contexts and experimental studies to evaluate the efficacy of the cirriculum and launch it as an open educational resource. We have prepared an open online tutorial in the form of a presentation besides the cirriculum under the light of our teaching experiences and released them in the website of the project and Project Results Platform.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 103090 Eur

Project Coordinator

Sariyer Ortaokulu & Country: TR

Project Partners

• I.C. 4° C.D.Bregante – S.M.Volta
• SUMBUL ANADOLU LISESI
• Osnovno uchilishte “Nikola Parapunov”
• Niepubliczna Szkola Podstawowa Lokomotywa
• 37 Dimotiko Sxoleio Irakleiou Kritis