DiGiTeachEUrope – developing digital Learning Environments for schools in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

DiGiTeachEUrope – developing digital Learning Environments for schools in 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 : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development)

Project Summary

In the school sector, the transformation to a digital knowledge society and other social changes mean that learning with and via media must be systematically anchored as a task for the future. The educational mission of schools is essentially to prepare students adequately for life in current and future society and to enable them to participate actively and responsibly in cultural, social, political, professional and economic life. In doing so, social and economic change processes, such as digitization and new requirements, are addressed.
Learning no longer takes place exclusively in the classroom. Web 2.0 also leads to a change in the role of teachers: The teacher is increasingly becoming a learning guide and learning advisor. In addition to changing roles, comprehensive knowledge of methodology and didactics is also required: Lifelong learning is also becoming an important task for teachers in order to cope with the change processes in society and schools. There is a clear discrepancy between the existing media-pedagogical competences of teachers and the educational policy demands and (training) practice. Studies show that the acquisition of individual aspects of media-pedagogical competence takes place mainly within the framework of self-study and less in the form of further education and training. The assessment of active teachers’ own media-pedagogical skills also shows a clear need for development. The DiGiTeachEUrope project anchors innovative digital forms of learning in European schools in order to ensure and improve the quality of teaching by integrating the potential of digital media.
The partnership is made up of the Querenburg Institute affiliated with the University of Bochum, the schools in Dülken, Split, Kavadarci and Sierakowicach and the Ludwig-Windhorst-Haus in Lingen as the applicant, which has many years of experience in organizing teacher training. The common goal was the preparation of tools and apps suitable for teaching purposes, which are available to the public as open educational materials (OER) in the form of a website (https://www.digiteacheurope.eu/). The target group was therefore primarily the group of teachers. Only by increasing the expertise of teachers will it be possible to pass on media expertise and motivation to students to deal with digital learning content. This was made very clear during the homeschooling because of Covid-19: all project participants benefited from the comprehensive knowledge acquired in the project. In addition to the exchange, scientific, methodological and didactic input was repeatedly provided in order to give the participants a broad basis of argumentation and information necessary for implementation in schools. For this purpose, knowledge of adult didactics was also conveyed. These insights were used to communicate the project contents to colleagues.
Work packages were defined and visualized at the first project meeting. Two large topic areas form the content-related discussion: “Digital Media”, which includes media-didactic topics dealing with all variants of the use of technical media for teaching and learning purposes in schools, and “Effective Teaching and Learning”, which deals with the principles of more effective teaching and learning in schools.
In order to enable learning on site, the project meetings took place transnationally. All participants were able to learn from the existing European know-how so that they could learn which approaches and methods enrich teaching and learning in times of digitalization. According to the heterogeneity of the group, a permanent exchange between the meetings on the platform SLACK took place, which is reflected in the project structure and was helpful in the time of the pandemic (short-term project redirection, transfer of new findings among each other, etc.). By inviting the project members to all schools, the sensitivity of the local teachers was increased and the participants had the opportunity to involve regional experts, thus increasing the exchange within the group and the implementation at the school.
Per institution 3-4 actors participated, which also facilitated the implementation at the school, as the project participants could support each other. Due to the Corona pandemic one learning activities and one transnational project meeting had to be cancelled. Nevertheless, the project members were well prepared for digital teaching and were able to pass on their expertise to colleagues.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 121277,5 Eur

Project Coordinator

Ludwig Windthorst Haus & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Clara-Schumann-Gymnasium
• SOU Dobri Daskalov – Kavadarci
• Zespol Szkol Ponadgimnazjalnych w Sierakowicach
• Privatna jezicna gimnazija Pitagora
• Querenburg-Institut