ICT: Learning and Teaching with Critical Thinking Erasmus Project

Project Title

ICT: Learning and Teaching with Critical Thinking

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Early childhood education and care

Project Summary

This project was created after the contact seminar that took place in Stockholm (dec 19). During the seminar, the representants of Sweden, Latvia and Estonia realised that their preschools had a concrete need of developing their pedagogical methods within ICT. Those three preschools have worked with IT-tools in different ways, but they never used IT as a way to teach other subjects. The three preschools decided to create an international collaboration to improve their own methods by opening up to an international perspective and approach. Through previous contacts and e-Twinning, they found two more preschools in Italy and Turkey which had the same need.
With over 600 children, 150 teachers and school members, this project will give the possibility to many preschool staff to exchange the best practice and spread the results through Europe in order to improve the sense of belonging to the same community and to have a wider range to try new methods and get results that can be applied anywhere in Europe. The quality of the results will be given by the fact that the new pedagogical methods will be tested and evaluated in different areas of Europe. This will lead to a more objective analysis which is not only related to a specific school in Europe, but it will be related to the combination of different results according to different preschools. When analysing the results, it will be possible to write guidelines that can be applied by any teacher in Europe.
We chose to develop this topic since there is a pedagogical need to be better at using ICT for learning and teaching in each of the preschools. Moreover, the new national curricula of the countries that are involved in the project require that the preschools have to develop new methods for early childhood and care focusing on ICT. This was established to give the children the possibility to get ready to become the next generation’s citizens and develop their IT-skills .The national curricula want the preschools to work with innovative practices in a digital era since there is a lack of new methods that stimulate the children to try new techniques to learn and study. At the same time, we want our children and teachers to see ICT as a resource, not only as a game, that needs to be used to learn,study and teach. We will find better methods to work with Internet, images and ethics in order to make the children more aware about the use of the digital tools in the present and in the next future.
In order to get good results and to make the project alive, the preschool have already agreed on which activities that need to be held before, during and after the all period that the project is active. There will be weekly briefings and skype meetings to get updates about the project. All the tasks are already preassigned from the coordinator so that each school knows about the expectations and the requirements that need to be followed in order to make goals. The coordinator will make sure that everybody feels welcome to ask questions, but at the same time, will follow up each school separately.
During the learning activities where three members of the school staff from each preschool will meet there will be the possibility to both discuss in seminar groups, but even to try on the place new It-tools, techniques and write guidelines and a leaflet. Those activities are very helpful since the teachers need to reflect back on their own approaches, to make them better, draw parallels with the international preschools and find the best practice that will be presented to other schools in a close future.
There will be five international meeting that are already planned. Each school will be responsible for the planning of at least one meeting, but sometimes, some schools will lead part of the activities during the meeting. This is something very important that will make the preschools very active in the whole process.
We will organise conferences for the staff members during the meetings abroad. Moreover, we will have conferences at the end of the program in order to spread information about the Erasmus project, our project, the leaflet and the guidelines that we produced.
The results that will obtain will be very clear: Through an international exchange and the possibility to analyse the reaction of the different preschool children to our methodologies and technologies, we will be able to guide other schools or teachers that want to work with ICT but do not know how to improve their pedagogical methods. We will understand how to create new and better pedagogical strategies to learn and teach with critical thinking so that the children can use technology to study different subjects being aware of the use of the Internet, the images and the amount of screentime that is necessary on a daily basis.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 89970 Eur

Project Coordinator

Jensen förskola Norrmalm & Country: SE

Project Partners

• Assaku Lasteaed
• Istituto Comprensivo Statale “Elio Tonelli”
• Perihan Akturk Anaokulu
• SIA ” LAIK” Privata pirmsskolas izglitibas iestade “Pasaku Valstiba”