Make ECEC institutions fit for the digital age leaving no one behind

Nowadays ICT is a powerful tool to motivate and challenge children, expand their perception of the world, their language and thinking, and develop their values as being indigenous. ICT is also an important component of today’s learning process. The project partners had a mission to contribute to social development by enhancing early learners ability to generate new knowledge, also by supporting teachers to share and distribute best practices among ECEC communities and to find innovative ways to provide and utilize knowledge to further the prosperity of society. Sharing and strengthening the ECE sector teachers knowledge in ICT for the sake of the development of new and modern ways of teaching and learning by using animation is very helpful for pupils personal development. Teachers should be able to create material that will correspond to the existing educational program. Teachers working in the kindergartens are not using ICT to its full potential, it is a source of information, so they should be encouraged to participate in ICT-related professional training to understand the didactic opportunities ICT offers for early childhood education and its developmentally related pros and cons and adopt innovative ICT-related pedagogies.

The project aim is to improve digitalization of ECEC sector including the creation of animation content and strengthening the quality assurance. The project objectives: • find the best experiences of usage of ICT tools in ECE; • create a training program for ECE teachers on how to create digital content; • create a training program for ECE teachers on how to create animation; • create a training platform for ECE teachers; • provide training for ECE teachers, that they could create their games/tools; • create at least 40 examples of ICT based teaching tools; • create a digitalization framework for better implementation of the EU quality framework for ECEC. This project aims to create 3 intellectual products: • Good experience compendium of ICT tools in ECE sector. • Training program (including training platform) for ECE teachers how to create ICT based educational content with special focus on the creation of animation. • Quality Assurance Framework to assess how digital tools/resources affect the 5 Quality principles.

During the project partners organized 4 transnational project meetings in Greece, Lithuania, Italy and Spain. Also online project partners meetings via Zoom were held to ensure a successful project implementation process. The project Handbook and the Dissemination Plan was created. The children of the participating ECEC institutions were also involved in the design process of the project's logo, as their drawings served as a source of inspiration and were later used to create the cover illustration for the project's Facebook page. The drawing competition involved children from Lithuania, Italy and Spain. Each country established Stakeholder Committee, which have become external advisers and evaluators for the project outcomes and helped to involve other organizations in the project, especially from local level. The project partners have jointly collected 38 good practices and compiled them into good experience compendium of ICT tools in ECE sector. The project developed a training platform, which was used as a basis for national trainings and the piloting of the training program in all project partner countries. In the end of the project 4 multiplier events were organized in Lithuania, Italy, Greece and Spain to present project results for a broader audience.

During the project partners created 3 concrete intellectual outputs: • Good experience compendium of ICT tools in ECEC sector. • Training program (including training platform) for ECEC teachers how to create ICT based educational content with special focus on the creation of animation. • Quality Assurance Framework to assess how digital tools/resources affect the 5 Quality principles.