Don’t Mind The Gap! – How to use educational videos to bridge the digital gaps between teachers and pupils Erasmus Project

Project Title

Don’t Mind The Gap! – How to use educational videos to bridge the digital gaps between teachers and pupils

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; Creativity and culture; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

“Don’t Mind the Gap!” (DMTG) was a project based on the observation that the digital gap between teachers and pupils and the digital gap among pupils and among teachers remains one of the main problems in developing various digital skills in today´s schools.
To bridge that gap we wanted to work with both teachers and pupils on “educational videos”. Producing educational videos is unthinkable nowadays without using digital devices both for recording, cutting, assembling and sharing these videos and videos are commonly accepted by teachers of all kinds of subjects, as they have been widely used in schools since the 1970s.

Thus the objectives of our project were to enable teachers and pupils to produce different kinds of “educational videos” (e.g. documentaries, How-to-videos, vlogs, screencasts, video tutorials, …) in order to help teachers and pupils overcome their scepticism regarding their own digital competences. We also wanted them to develop tools that will help them to discover the quality criteria that apply to different kinds of “educational videos” and to develop tools to test the effectiveness of educational videos. So they have also been doing some real research on topics whose larger themes have been proposed by the organizing teachers but with a free choice of subtopics.

There have been two kinds of participants in the meetings: teachers involved in the different transnational meetings, the shorter exchanges of groups of people and of course the joint staff teacher training. There have been 25 teachers directly involved in the meetings.
There will also be the pupils involved in the project. About 80 pupils have been directly involved in the shorter exchanges of groups of pupils, another 400 – 500 pupils have been directly involved in other project activities in the participating schools.

As for the activities there has been a lot of research on different topics, scripting and video-production going on in schools in order to prepare the shorter exchange of groups of pupils and in international teams during the shorter exchanges of groups of people.

We thus created videos on democracy in schools, some of the explaining the concept and different forms of school democracy, others using interviews with EU parliamentarians about the topic of democracy in schools. We also created videos on our cultural specificities and cultural differences in city quarters using different animation software. We created videos on the topic of inclusion and different aspects and forms of inclusion and finally created a series of videos explaining what digital competencies are and how to acquire them.

The videos have been made available through school websites, the different schools facebook pages and a Youtube channel and have first been shown to public in release parties that have been the closing events of all shorter exchanges of groups of pupils.

In collaboration with our non-school partner “Medienzentrum Ostbelgien” and cooperating with Paperplane Productions a local based production company, we have also organized a teacher training involving 20 teachers from the 4 participating countries, who learnt how to create educational videos in a hands-on approach in order to implement the technique in their schools.

RESULT & IMPACT

We have also produced methodology handouts and lesson plans for teachers and pupils to help them realize educational videos in their classes, on subjects in their school curriculae or subjects they are simply interested in.

Subtitled versions of the videos and handouts and lesson plans in Czech, Danish, German or Latvian – which we inititally wanted to realize with our students, have not been realized due to the restrictions of the Covid-19 situation, which all schools had to face more or less intensely. And there were bigger problems to solve and more important things to do that to invest in realizing these project dissemination results.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 133170,47 Eur

Project Coordinator

Pater – Damian – Sekundarschule & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Gymnazium, Jesenik, Komenského 281
• Medienzentrum der Deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens
• Talsi State gymnasium
• Gefion Gymnasium