Digital school: challenges and opportunities

The goal of this project is to improve both teachers’ and students’ digital competence. The applicant organizations have experience working together (we started collaborating in eTwinning and later moved to a KA219 project, which we carried out over the past two years) and agree on the need to adapt the methodology taking advantage of the possibilities of ICT.On the one hand, we will design transnational teacher training activities. There will two seminars (one in each country), which will allow the attendance of five foreign teachers in each case. The participating teachers will receive training on the use of digital tools; they will also create didactic material to be distributed under an open license, and they will design the tasks that the students will carry out together in a virtual scenario during the course. The seminars will be conducted by specialized external trainers when required by the complexity of the tool.On the other hand, there will be four short-term exchanges which will involve a group of ten pupils and two teachers each time. During their stay in the partner country, the schools will complete the tasks they would have started online during the previous months. The participating students will be of similar ages (16-17 years) to facilitate the relationship amongst them. In the case of those who accomplish the mobilities, age similarity will facilitate living together with the host families. The students will be invited to take part in videoblogs and digital magazines, and to carry out scientific research in their environment, sharing and analyzing their results. Those activities will allow the students to develop their ability and improve their confidence when speaking a foreign language. The implementation of joint activities will strengthen the cultural bonds and the sense of belonging to a global community of both teachers and students. The methodology in the online and on-site activities will be practical, using challenge solving strategies and experimental learning. At the end of the project we hope to improve the teachers’ competence in the use of digital learning platforms, to develop and didactic material to share with other teachers and to improve the pupils’ knowledge in all the areas and levels at which the project is aimed. We will use Europass documents to certify both the students' progress in the foreign language and their digital competence in a standard manner. We will organize events that will be open to the public on Europe Day, to display the students’ work in the frame of this Project.In the long run, we hope to consolidate the use of digital educational resources in our schools, and that our students improve their foreign language competence so that their career choice will not be determined by a gender bias or by ICT barriers.