DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS OVERCOMING THE DISASTERS

Every year, millions of children worldwide are affected by disasters in many forms (UNICEF 2007). Of these, more than seven million are children with disabilities, while millions more acquire disa...

Project Objectives: • To reduce the challenges faced by disabled individuals and students in disasters and emergency situations, and to enhance health and safety through innovative approaches to teaching and learning. • To increase the level of key competencies and skills, particularly those crucial for children, youth, and disabled individuals, while reducing the response time after disasters and emergencies occur. • To identify methods for implementing innovative teaching and learning approaches that address the needs of disabled children, youth, and individuals. • To conduct in-depth research and present a report on the difficulties faced by disabled individuals in disasters and emergencies, as well as the current situation. • To create accessible, adaptable, and multilingual resources using interactive games, open educational resources, and mobile applications. • To provide support on how healthy individuals should approach disabled individuals and what measures should be taken in the event of a disaster. • To decrease the number of injuries or deaths through disasters in general. • To increase the knowledge of students and community about the safety of disabled persons in different scenarios.

During our project, We had local and International activities as physically and online. We had Blended activities to support our physical activities. In detail; We had 3 TPMs ( Lithuania, Romania and Portugal ), Online Meetings in every 3 months and Collaborative online works for General Project Management and Implementation. We had one LTTA in Romania to train our staff and also complete the content of our Project outputs ( Mobile App ). We created Social Media Accounts and performed many dissemination activities; - Staff Meetings ( 4 by each partner ). - Informative and Dissemination Meetings with associated partners ( 3 by each partner ). - Media Apperances. - Social Media Posts. - Visits to local authorities and also other relevant partners on the theme of our project. We also had MEs in Lithuania, Turkiye, Greece and Portugal to pilot the our main project outputs and train the target group of persons (teachers, students and disabled people or parents of disabled students and persons). We piloted the main concrete outputs of our project through our Mobile App and Web Platform. We collected feedback from users and improved them. We used online tools to assess the project activities and to manage general cooperation and communication between partners. We also created core project teams in partner organisations. We created Intellectual Outputs ( Project Results ) as main ones are the following; - Conducted a detailed desk research to define the strenghts, weaknesses and needs on the themes of project application. - an accessible, interactive, multilingual webplatform where all project outputs are available. - an accessible, multilingual Mobile App functioning in Apple Store and Play Store. We created guides, toolkit, quizzes, interactive games in multilingual aspect for many main and sub topics of our project. We shared the project outputs through EPALE, ESEP and also Erasmus+ Projects Results Sharing Platforms.

The expected concrete outputs of our project were; The first IO referred to the conduct of comparative analysis, group interviews, and case studies in partner countries to draw specifications for the curricula and methodology for education and development of games and exercise for disaster risk response for children, youth, and persons with disabilities (materials were available in audio and braille alphabet formats). The applicant organization was the leader of the activity, together with the representatives from the associate partner - worked on creating and developing these curricula and methodologies for education in disaster prevention and emergency response. They also developed a questionnaire for the legal system connected with disaster risk prevention in EU countries, with a special emphasis on disabled persons. The second IO involved the development of a web application, OER where all materials and tools were posted. The third IO focused on the creation of a mobile application in the form of a quiz and multi-level interactive Games & Exercises for using disaster prevention and emergency response procedures using results from the first IO and respecting the needs of children, youth, and persons with disabilities. Materials were made so that they were available for visually impaired people who could use it with a voice program. The final products were Interactive games for students that could be used for educational purposes to increase their awareness about the safety in case of disasters or emergency situations. Besides those main concrete results, Newsletters, Questioonaires to assess and monitor project activities, Lots of Presentations and PDFs as educative materials would be expected to be produced.