KEY TO EU & your DIGIT@L SKILLS Erasmus Project

Project Title

KEY TO EU & your DIGIT@L SKILLS

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

“KEY TO EU & your DIGIT@L SKILLS” foresees the development of learning activities among pupils from different nationalities throughout a period of 24 months, from Oct. 2020 to Oct. 2022, aimed at enhancing important key skills which school curricular programmes are not always able to cover and develop. Professional trends are in great demand for individuals equipped with digital skills, but also social and cognitive abilities, such as critical thinking, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, etc. in order to be able to adapt to uncertainty and develop resilience. Indeed, such abilities are known as 21st Century Skills, competences emerging as more and more important for innovation, growth and participation in a digital society and economy.
According to the NEW SKILLS AGENDA FOR EUROPE, education and training systems must deliver the right mix of skills, including digital and transversal key competences. Digital because it is necessary for pupils to adapt to the technological change and use ICT in a more conscious approach; transversal because in a world dominated by robots and automatized systems, it is pivotal to empower in people a set of soft skills that machines cannot emulate: empathy, team work, problem solving, cultural awareness, and the list goes on.
Aware of the shortage of digital skills in the EU affecting the whole population, including the young generations, misnamed “digital natives” – of which almost half do not have advanced digital skills (Final Report WOMEN IN THE DIGITAL AGE, 2018) – the schools forming the Strategic Partnership (St John Bosco College; IES “A. Xunqueira I”; Vocational School “F. Giordani”; “SU Sv.sv. Kiril I Metodi”) decided to promote the transnational mobility of 84 young learners (more will be involved through eTwinning virtual exchanges), aged 15-17, during 4 international exchanges lasting 5 days, plus 2 days destined to travel arrangements from and to the Hosting Countries: United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Spain and Italy.
Participants will be guided towards the creation of a concrete output: the “DIGsoftCOMP” platform thought as an integrative tool for the European Framework of Digital Competences (DigComp 2.1) and aimed at tracing the link between soft and digital skills. Apart from the final output, the project objectives are:
-to enhance some of the pupils’ key competences and soft skills so as to mold their profiles according to the demands coming from the labor market through personalized transnational training activities;
-to sensitize educational stakeholders and schools towards the Digital Gender Divide, which sees 57% of women graduating in tertiary education, but only 24.9% of them specializing in ICT-related fields. Researches show how gender inequality in the digital sphere depends on the strong unconscious biases about what capacities each gender is believed to have. In fact, some of the project activities will specifically target this topic and foresee the active participation of girls to favor female digital entrepreneurship;
-to speed the internationalization process of the partner schools by empowering its staff’s language/digital skills throughout the project lifespan as well as by enriching their curriculum with an additional management experience in the framework of the Erasmus+ Programme.
The project “KEY TO EU & your DIGIT@L SKILLS” will produce the following positive impacts:
-students will be more aware of the European Digital Competence Framework and of how digital skills can function better if supported by certain soft skills, as abilities that machinery cannot provide;
-teachers will integrate the didactic methodologies and self-assessment tools used during the LTTAs in their teaching routine;
-female students will be encourage to enroll in digital courses and pursue a career in the digital sector, thus counteracting the Digital Gender Divide;
-new didactic activities, transnational projects and virtual exchanges will stem from the cooperation among the partner schools to enhance the quality of teaching key skills.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 112236 Eur

Project Coordinator

St John Bosco College & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Средно училище “Св.св. Кирил и Методий”
• Iti Ls F.Giordani
• IES A XUNQUEIRA I