Digi Teachers Working Online

The project wanted to enhance teaching staff’s proficiency especially in the areas of digital resources, teaching and learning, and empowering learners. During and after the COVID 19 pandemic, t...

Our goals were: Participants gain a wide and valuable knowledge to improve and enhance their digital skills and competences with a strong link to pedagogy. Participating organisations gain new digital and pedagogical methods to benefit the students and enhance the quality of online learning and teaching. Organisations get new tools, ideas, and practices. The level of competence on organisational level increases. The indirect target group’s digital key competences and lifelong learning improve. The learners have more possibilities. Their learning will get recognition and validation. Other relevant stakeholders get new ideas and concrete tools to utilise digital tools and methods with their clients.

The concept of the project was to test new digital training content to develop digital competence of VET teaching staff. We began the project by making a survey about the current digital skills of the teaching staff in consortium organisations (result 1). Based on this information and DigCompEdu, we built a syllabus about crucial digital skills and competences (result 2). The syllabus was taken into use when building an online training module (result 3) that consists of theoretical and pedagogical material about digital resources, teaching and learning, and empowering learners. The material was piloted during the project by a group of teaching staff in participating organisations (result 4). At the same time we piloted open badges that were created for the training module (result 2). The good practices and practical examples were collected in a toolkit (result 5). All of this material is collected on website digiteachers.eu. The project had five transnational meetings and monthly online meetings. Each participating country organised a multiplier event in the end of the project. Even other dissemination events were organised.

The digital skills and competences of the teaching staff in the participating organisations were improved. We investigated the skills of the teaching staff by making a survey both in the beginning and in the end of the project. It was clear that those teachers, that participated in the piloting of the training material, had more competence of adapting their digital skills to the needs of the learners. The organisations shared good practices, methods, and tools for working with learners with special needs. This could be seen as better abilities to carry out online teaching and blended learning, which will improve the students’ learning experiences and helped to create individual learning paths also with the use of digitality. The organisations were able to create a network, which helps to develop their activities and share knowledge and expertise also in the future. The network will work together in both mobility projects and strategic partnership projects in the future. There is a training module (with open badge constellation and a toolkit) that is open to anybody’s use. The material that was created during the project helps to enhance digital skills and at the same time takes into consideration the requirements of special needs education.