Digital Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Europe

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The project idea originates from everyday school life in each of the four participating schools: The digitalization of schools is on the political and school agenda in all European countries, as a reaction to the change the world is facing through digital technologies. Students grow up as “digital natives” and are often ahead of their teachers when it comes to modern technologies, but on the other hand they are not yet able to sufficiently reflect the side-effects of these technologies, such as reward and conditioning mechanisms on which social media are based, or they have a limited impulse control. In addition, many adolescents still do not have an overview of the “digital footprint” they leave behind when using the Internet. A particular problem of the Internet is its abundance of information: One of the greatest challenges for children and adolescents is to assess whether or not texts, images or videos they come across are true and authentic.

Schools must react to these challenges for their pupils at all costs – this has also been recognised by German politicians, who recently made 5 billion euros available for equipping schools with the appropriate technology as the so-called Digital Pact. But digital education is much more than that: It includes, above all, systematic guidance for pupils, turning them into autonomous users of digital technologies, exploiting the opportunities offered by these technologies and minimising the risks involved.
Only the Finnish school already teaches digital education according to a curriculum and still does not yet know how to solve the challenges described above satisfactorily.

The present project therefore intends to take a critical look at central aspects of their digital environment together with the pupils and, on this basis, to develop the basic features of digital education for schools in the form of a digital curriculum.
The following four aspects are to be particularly focused on for one school semester.

1. Digital Information and critical reading (fake news, news competence)
2. Computer Games (potential for addiction, exploration of school applications)
3. Big Data (Alexa, Siri; influence on our lives)
4. Social Media (friendship/bullying, influencer marketing)

These aspects will be addressed in a European dimension (international similarities and differences in the use of digital technology) during the two-year project period. Depending on their specific competences, each school will be in charge of one of the aspects, will prepare key questions on which all pupils will work during the six-month period, will organize on-site training and a learning mobility during the corresponding six-month period and is responsible for the completion of the curriculum on the respective topic. The project will be staffed with teachers from various subjects (computer science, English, art, philosophy) and will cooperate with external institutions such as universities and institutions dealing with digital education for young people. This will ensure that the project will deal with a wide range of facets, including current developments (e.g. serious games for computer, apps for checking facts, etc.).

The results of this project will be a curriculum on digital education (including image film) developed together with the students, which will be implemented and published in the participating schools, as well as short films on how to deal with social media, and a training unit on how to deal with digital technologies for primary school students. In order to make the results usable in the future, pupils will also be trained as “Digital Experts”, who will support teachers in using the developed teaching unit and carry out the training procedure primary schools even beyond the duration of the project.

The participants in all participating schools are groups of about 24 students of the eighth and ninth grades, because the students at this age are experienced users of digital technologies and already have an appropriate level of reflection, which raises the students’ awareness of possible risks so that they can jointly develop principles for their use in school. Due to the different forms of school organisation, the project will be carried out in Finland and Germany in regular classes, while in the Netherlands and Great Britain the school structure will only allow implementation outside regular classes in form of extracurricular classes. The groups of pupils benefiting from the project are considerably larger due to its implementation in the individual school curriculum and the training units used in primary schools.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 119660 Eur

Project Coordinator

Graf-Anton-Guenther Schule & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Englantilainen koulu
• Praedinius Gymnasium
• Valley Invicta Academies’ Trust trading as Valley Park School