Digital Treasure Box

In order to meet current educational standards, it is becoming increasingly important to be up to date with the emerging technological trends and approaches. The DIGI-TB project focuses on digitalization in the kitchen and service areas. This topic is relevant to all participant schools since they all deliver training courses related to gastronomy and cooking. The partner schools from Austria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Italy and Lithuania have set the aim to create and publish digital cooking recipes, develop new educational methods. Using digital solutions to market and exploit them in the catering industry will support the attractiveness of the catering profession in VET. Transnational cooperation is very important to effectively address the challenges identified at EU level, e.g. slow digitalization of VET curricula, insufficient level of trainers‘ digital skills, low attractiveness of VET offers for young people, etc. The project aims to form a school exchange partnership that will address the need of introducing innovative methods and tools into vocational education and training. The participants will get introduced and acquire new knowledge about traditional cuisines of relevant countries, will learn about the benefits of slow food, seasonal cooking and using natural food resources, will learn how to prepare national dishes of each partner country/region. By participating in workshops with specially selected companies, they will learn to deal with and better understand sustainability in production.The participating pupils, supported by their teachers, will develop a digital Treasure Box, i.e. a repository of digital recipes and other educational resources, that could be used both for enriching in-classroom learning and for supporting the implementation of distance learning. The project will ensure that the particiaption schools, students and teachers benefit from any possible result that the mobilities and exchangees between them can guarantee. As one of the expected results, we tried to distinguish and highlight the most important and most valueble experiences in each hosting country. All the developed results can be easily transferred and exploited in the curricula of gastronomic orientated schools in the partner countries and in other countries as well. While working and interacting together during four international school exchanges, the pupils will improve not only their digital and social skills, but they will also develop their intercultural competence which is key for becoming open-minded European citizens.The DIGI-TB project also supports the objective of strengthening the profiles of the teaching professions by providing opportunity to VET trainers to become more engaged and involved in the design of training curricula as well as to introduce new methods, digital tools and innovative content during their teaching practices. The project will also contribute to the upskilling of VET trainers by offering them to participate in joint staff training events planned within the framework of the project.