Enhancing the Digital and Social Well-being in Schools Erasmus Project

Project Title

Enhancing the Digital and Social Well-being in Schools

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 2020

Project Topics

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

Project Summary

Nowadays, students’ well-being in European schools has become a challenge for numerous teachers to confront, partly due to the needs of the new digital world. A gap that directly arises from this is to develop effective tools for students to have a healthy online life (JRC). There is strong research evidence, which suggests that young people do not have the appropriate skills that a person needs in the new digital world (European Commission Recommendations). Any form of misuse of the internet could jeopardise the well-being of students, as well as their success at school (OECD, 2017). In addition, according to the PIAAC survey, there is an alarming need to develop the life skills of young people in order to increase their health literacy skills and well-being.

The iWell project focuses on empowering primary school students, aged 9 – 12, to lead a healthy online life and boost their social well-being. Better levels of health are pivotal in order to reach well-being and happiness, as there is scientific evidence supporting that healthier populations tend to live longer and have a better rate of development (WHO, 2015). This project focuses on empowering students to develop the necessary competences to make informed and healthy decisions with regards to the use of digital media, in order to control the determinants of their health. Significantly, all educators and school leaders should acquire the necessary skills to teach their students in order to benefit the most of this great potential that is provided to them and try to enhance their digital literacy skills and act as “active health agents” to promote their students’ health literacy skills.

In this context, iWell addresses the demands of providing teachers with the necessary skills of teaching their students to enhance their life skills and digital literacy skills for their online safety and social well-being. iWell satisfies a number of ERASMUS+ objectives and aims at:

– Supporting educators in becoming “active health agents” to promote the digital and social well-being of their students
– Enhancing the digital and life skills (decision making, social skills and self-confidence) of primary school, paying emphasis on maintaining a healthy balance of digital media use
– Facilitating the teaching process to develop health literacy and critical thinking skills of students for their online safety and to maximise their learning opportunities at school
– Facilitating the process of students to maintain a healthy online life.
– Providing European educators with new approaches, ICTs methodologies and research-based evidence to foster social integration and integrate new tools into teaching activities

The work of the consortium will be broken down into a series of overlapping phases, incorporating research, analysis, development, testing and implementation, localisation and exploitation of project outputs. The most important outputs of the project will be the development of the iWell Curriculum for Educators, Library of Comic Strips and the iWell Gamified Environment for students, which will address, among others, the thematic areas of cyberbullying, self-image and self-identity (creative and critical thinking, addiction in Social Media, healthy relationships (communication and interpersonal skills), self-awareness and empathy, resilience, coping with emotions and coping with stress. Students will be called to make decisions based on given scenarios to experience real-life situations through the gamified environment. The intellectual outputs that will be produced during the project are the following:

-IO1: Library of Health Comic Strips
-IO2: Curriculum and Training Material for Educators
-IO3: Health Literacy Mini Games
-IO4: Teacher Professional Development MOOC
-IO5: Health Literacy Toolkit with Policy & Practice Recommendations

The consortium consists of 6 partners from 5 European countries, which bring an extensive range of experience and expertise related to the aims and scope of the iWell project. In addition, the consortium aims to have a European outreach of the project activities, which is facilitated by the partnership’s diversity, along with the exchange of good practices and learning among partners.

Longer-term benefits: The project’s impact and sustainability will be enhanced by involving numerous associate partners and members of the target groups and stakeholders during all the project phases. Development of Toolkit with Policy & Practice Recommendationswill also take place in order to show-case the project’s products and results among a variety of other stakeholders. A pivotal aspect of the project’s success is the extended network of project partners, which consists of more than 5000 organisations, which will be employed to disseminate and exploit the final outcomes of the project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 199420 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION & Country: BG

Project Partners

• KENTRO MERIMNAS OIKOGENEIAS KAI PAIDIOU
• CENTRE FOR ADVANCEMENT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY LTD-CARDET
• The Rural Hub CLG
• INNOVADE LI LTD
• CESIE