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Executive Agency, Education, Audiovisual and Culture

N°. 531300-LLP-1-2012-1-GR-KA3-KA3NW

DigiSkills: Network for the enhancement of digital competence skills

Progress Report Public Part


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Project information

Project acronym: DigiSkills

Project title: Network for the enhancement of digital competence

skills

Project number: N°. 531300-LLP-1-2012-1-GR-KA3-KA3NW

Sub-programme or KA: KA3 ICT Network

Project website: http://digiskills-project.ea.gr/

Reporting period: From 01/12/12

To 30/05/13

Report version: 1

Date of preparation: 30/05/13

Beneficiary organisation: Ellinogermaniki Agogi

Project coordinator: Argiris Tzikopoulos

Project coordinator organisation: Ellinogermaniki Agogi

Project coordinator telephone number: +30 210 8176799

Project coordinator email address: [email protected]

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. © 2008 Copyright Education, Audiovisual & Culture Executive Agency. The document may be freely copied and distributed provided that no modifications are made, that the source is acknowledged and that this copyright notice is included.


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Executive Summary

The consortium, by building on the extended expertise of its members in the field, will implement a foresight process to map and through consecutive cycles of reflection to propose effective methods that will support the modernisation of SE, HE and AE and the development of teachers’ and students’ digital competencies, and will stimulate demand according to Action 68 of the Digital Agenda for Europe. The project team will review scientific evidence from Europe and beyond and educational stakeholders’ views and aspirations to identify and analyse the emerging trends, opportunities and challenges in education and eLearning, that will act as the most significant drivers of the modernization of the SE, HE and AE pedagogy in the mid-term future. The project team will provide the widest and most inclusive understanding and framework for the subsequent stage of experimental fieldwork. The aim of the DigiSkills network is to help learning communities acquire and reinforce such skills and knowledge so that they make best use of the new opportunities offered by the digital content that is available on the web. The project aims to achieve that through the collection, implementation and testing of a series of participatory engagement activities that will improve the uptake, sharing and reuse of innovative teaching and learning practices. ICT is present in different teaching and learning environments, both as access stations to networks, and as tools for information or data analysis and processing. ICT starts being used in broadly common ways across disciplines to maximise learning outcomes (tools for analysis, development and processing), and for specific roles in the learning process. ICT also encourages the development of competences and the application of relevant knowledge in simulated situations, while at other times it permits assessments, or self-evaluations, to diagnose aptitudes. ICT also provides efficient tools for drawing up reports, portfolios and presentations of research results and projects, etc. Students and teachers are able to communicate with their peers, have access to quality digital databases and archives, and publish in digital educational academic magazines. In general, the project aims to improve SE, HE and AE teachers practice in all areas of their work, combining ICT skills with innovations in pedagogy, curriculum, and institution organisation. It is also aimed at SE, HE and AE teachers’ use of ICT skills and resources to improve their teaching, to collaborate with colleagues, and perhaps ultimately to become innovation leaders in their institutions. In addition, train technically competent staff (such as ICT personnel or teachers of Informatics) about the ways they can select some of the existing, easy-to-use, and free-of-cost software tools that various organisations around Europe offer, in order to set up their own learning tools (on their institution or regional level) and to interconnect it with existing infrastructures. The overall objective of the project is not only to improve classroom practice, but also to both raise the awareness of educational community across Europe on the need for innovative teaching and learning practices and learning to learn skills. The innovation of the proposed network lies within the connection of best practices from various European countries on school/universities education and training, open to wide teacher and students communities who will then effectively provide digital competencies.


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Table of Contents

1. PROJECT OBJECTIVES .................................................................................... 5

2. PROJECT APPROACH ...................................................................................... 7

3. PROJECT OUTCOMES & RESULTS ................................................................. 8

4. PARTNERSHIPS .............................................................................................. 14

5. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE .............................................................................. 16

6. CONTRIBUTION TO EU POLICIES ................................................................. 19

7. EXTRA HEADING/SECTION ............................................................................ 20


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1. Project Objectives

DigiSkills aims to serve as an accelerator of the sharing, adoption, usage, and re-purposing of the already rich existing eLearning resources. First of all, it will demonstrate ways to involve SE, HE and AE communities in innovative teaching and learning practices through the effective use of eLearning resources. It will promote community building between numerous educational institutions of Europe and empower them to use, share and exploit unique resources from a wealth of educational repositories, within meaningful educational activities. In addition, it will demonstrate the potential of eLearning resources to meet the educational and quality needs of these communities, supported by DigiSkills Inventory a social platform where teachers, students, parents and other community members will be able to discover, acquire, discuss and adapt eLearning resources on their topics of interest and also use e-assessment tolls. Finally, it will assess the impact and document the whole process into a DigiSkills Best Practice Guidelines that will include guidelines for the design and implementation of effective resource-based educational activities that could act as a reference to be adopted by stakeholders in education.

Its basic aims can be summarized in the following:

First, to develop a detailed and systematic methodology to define the criteria for identifying the best practices (as identified in each partner) and then operate as the frame for the collection and formation of exceptional teaching and learning approaches with the view to provide/collect innovative teaching and learning practices.

Second, to design and develop a web-based Inventory, which will include a collection and categorization of best practices that can support learning community and where users will be able to find, exchange and adapt innovative teaching and learning practices and exchange ideas and best practices (termed as the DigiSkills Inventory).

Third to establish a constantly-expanding network of SE, HE and AE communities informed on the necessity of innovative teaching and learning practices and trained in effective use of ICT in teaching. This network shall operate in an independent way, with teachers supplying the educational material and ultimately being responsible for the preservation and further enhancement of the inventory and through Web2.0-based approaches and tools.

Fourth, to collect and develop innovative, relevant and multilingual content that will support the proposed approach, which will be described and stored (in the form of learning objects) in the Inventory’s repository of content.


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Fifth, to develop ICT literacy skills and ensure the access to and use of innovative teaching and learning practices by the users under the umbrella of community building. Community building is critical component that will enable their success in learning programs by reducing isolation, mentoring success, transforming experiences of exclusion to ones of inclusion, offering encouragement and hope, and fostering group dialogue and peer learning from secondary to higher and adult education communities.

Additionally, to carry out a set of pilot sessions with a number of representative user groups (teachers, students, parents, policy makers, adults returning to higher education, learners entering the workplace) in order to enrich/ localize/ adapt content to current needs and evaluate the proposed approach.

Finally, to perform an extended dissemination and validation of the project outcomes in a wide network across Europe, and to circulate effective teaching methods through networking with relevant projects, networks and initiatives. This way, it will be certified that the collective knowledge on innovative teaching and learning practices will be used after the 3-year circle of DigiSkills. The “Guide of Good Practice”, to be composed for this network, supports the deployment of ICT educational content through constantly increasing access and re-usability of related resources, tools and lessons (WP7). This will produce a set of policy recommendations, which will be deployed at regional, national and transnational level (i.e. EU agencies, National Governments and Administration).


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2. Project Approach

DigiSkills is clearly describing its main objectives, as well as quantifies its expected results. It outlines a vision of what can be achieved with adequate investment, and provides a concrete set of guidelines and recommendations that can achieve that vision – a plan with clear targets, pre-defined objectives, strong priorities, and a management plan that will ensure continuous evaluation and feedback. The envisaged procedure consists of the following basic phases:

a) Good Practice Thematic Search and Organization: during this first period, which is going to last 11 months, good practices shall be collected from all partners as well as from affiliated institutions in the areas of effective use of eLearning resources. Participating countries will equally contribute to this process through the focus groups as well as through the practice exchange forum to be organized, following a set of guidelines and criteria ensuring the quality of these best practices. Moreover, a first summer school shall be organized, focusing precisely at the collection of such best practices. The overall collection process will be certified through very specific evaluation methodologies to come up with the most appropriate one for assessing the collected good practices, falling under both WP2 and WP5, which regards quality assurance.

b) Implementation: this 27-month period is the core phase of the three-year work. During it, a number of events shall be organized for the exchange, validation and evaluation of the collected best practices: such as training sessions, contests and fairs, at least two summer schools, other parallel events as well as a European transnational workshop with EDEN’s contributions. To this shall contribute the specially developed web-based inventory that will allow all interested parties to access ideas and best practices on effective use of eLearning resources. All these actions shall create a European trend of teachers discussing, testing, implementing and eventually even developing effective practices.

c) Valorisation: this final period regards the Dissemination and Exploitation process. The formation of a set of recommendations to policy makers and regional authorities shall examine the ways European policy making specialists can use the DigiSkills Inventory and the collected and evaluated good practices in order to support the training of their citizens in taking advantage of ICT services. Moreover, a concrete guide of good practices for teachers (DigiSkills Best Practice Guidelines), resulting from the overall work, will be disseminated through teacher communities across Europe, aiming to be used as a guide for European teachers’ networks. Based on this, a final summer school will be organised, focusing on the most outstanding best practices collected. Finally a special conference is planned to be organised, with EDEN’ s contributions, during the last six months of the project. A special session of this conference will be devoted on the presentation of the project results and recommendations, but another session will be focused on the presentation of results from other related initiatives (such as other LLP projects) developing, adapting and testing similar topics. Representatives from all types of interested areas will be invited to participate in this dissemination event.


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3. Project Outcomes & Results

DigiSkills network aspires to address the necessity to develop an integrative approach in collecting and disseminating best practices that promote ICT enabled learning using innovative teaching and learning practices. To this end, a European network of all relevant actors (teachers and students in secondary education (SE), teachers and students in higher education (HE), parents, policy makers, adults returning to higher education, learners entering the workplace (AE) etc.) shall be formed and motivated through specific educational actions, contests, conferences and summer schools, to develop the competencies necessary in order to properly educate in digital competence and learning to learn skills and thus supporting the transition of Europe to a leading knowledge based economy. Overall the project team that has a network of experts from the education, pedagogy and qualitative research fields aims to design and implement a methodological approach that will contribute to a systematic assessment of the impact of the ICT enabled learning both in terms of learning outcomes and learning activities and to the delivery of a series of recommendations for possible future actions.

WP1 Project Management

The first deliverable of the project presents the project management structure (meetings etc) and all relevant project management procedures (reporting, escalation process, gap process etc). The DigiSkills Project Management Structure and Plan is an evolving document, and updates may be distributed in the form of revised versions or addendums. Also each meeting, minutes were developed by coordinator uploaded at the internal communication platform (BSCW) and also sent by e-mail to all partners in order the deadlines and tasks to be clarified. WP2 Good Practice Thematic Search and Organisation

WP2 focused on the state-of-the-art of innovative teaching and learning practices. The work concentrated on the development of a detailed and systematic methodology to define the criteria for identifying the best practices most suitable to the project’s purposes. In order to define these standards more effectively, an extensive literature review was carried out, also focusing on the current conditions in the participating countries as regards to resource based approaches. Identifying problematic areas and approaches leaded to a better understanding of the target groups’ needs, as well as the possibilities for connecting the educational to the industrial world (publishers and ad-hoc content providers). Overall 310 teachers participated in focus groups workshops countries as well as through the forum for exchange of good practices in the respective participating countries and gave their

Figure 1 DigiSkills Partners Workspace


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input to the current situation, the needs and problems of the educational systems in regards to innovative teaching and learning good practices.

WP3 Inventory and Community Building

Initially, the DigiSkills Inventory (http://www.digiskills-project.eu/) was designed and implemented as a tool with the specific functionalities and services as they were described in the proposal. In particular, the first version of Digiskill Inventory offered 3 types of users: registered user, moderator (all project’s partners) and administrator (CTI). Thus, the inventory was available only to registered users. Moreover the inventory-apart from its main functionality that is the uploading of best practices based on the criteria produced by WP2- included:

Social tools such as blogs, forums and wiki

Community tools such as groups, instant messaging and messaging

Tagging functionality

Figure 2 DigiSkills Workshops

Figure 3 Search for best practice


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However, during the implementation of the project the consortium decided that the inventory should become a focal tool of the project by providing additional social capabilities as well as additional features. Therefore before proceeding on the upgrade of the inventory, CTI created mockups showing the new proposed design and layout and all partners collaborated by commenting on the mockups. Based on the received comments and the feedback CTI created new mockups and applied all the changes requested. When the design process finished CTI started the development of the new version.

The new version of the inventory introduces many improvements and new functionalities. In general, as for the improvements it has been redesigned from the start to provide easy navigation and focuses on the use of social tools and social functionalities. Improvements on the design, includes the creation of new blocks of information and their appearance on the inventory, new layout and how the information is organized such as menus, secondary links, sitemap etc. and different colors that help the

user to browse the content and read with ease. Finally, the new version leaves the content

available to visitors to browse it and not only to registered users. In addition, the inventory provides 6 types of users: guest, registered user, regular user, expert user, VIP user and administrator (CTI) and in order a user to move to a higher status he/she has to perform specific activities (such to upload a specific number of best practices, to create specific number of blogs, comments and friends etc)

The main improvements and added features in the new version are the following: Improvements: Layout

The inventory uses 1-column and 2-column layout. The 2-column layout helps to show brief information about latest content, events etc. while keeping the main content only for the important information.

The menu has been categorized in four main groups keeping the structure

Figure 6 the new main page (after login)

Figure 5 The new interface of the front page

Figure 4 links to blogs, forum, wiki


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simple and intuitive for the simple user at the same time. Three main action buttons (share, inspire, connect) are now appearing in the

form of boxes in every page of the platform providing quick access to important functionalities that users are using a lot.

The inventory introduces a task bar on the top that follows the user while he scrolls. This task bar provides links to the profile page and also to social sharing functionalities (facebook, G+).

New Features: Social

Users can follow others and create a social community

Users can create friends and keep track of their activity

Users can find others easily using the new search field from their profile page

Content

Users can easily find the top rated content using the new slideshow on the front-page

The profile page shows a detailed information card for each user.

The profile page shows user activity and his relations activity (new content created, new comments, social activity etc.).

WP4 Implementation

The first DigiSkills training seminar took place at the first summer school of the project in Crete. Overall, 100 participants attended the 1st DigiSkills summer school, from 12 countries. The aim of the course was to support the development of European schools’ digital culture and teachers’ digital skills, so that they are able to understand the uses and applications of digital resources in school practice, and subsequently to benefit from digital content and technology solutions covering a wide range of areas: Science, Mathematics, ICT, Social Studies, Arts and Language Studies. This is envisaged to also promote the development of students’ key competences, with particular emphasis on problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration skills. Thus, teachers were not only familiarized with a unique collection of open digital educational resources, but were also trained to link them with innovative pedagogical practices, such as using real world learning activities, implementing resource based and project-based approaches. The DigiSkills intended audience through the strategy of the project’s results and outcomes, is not only addressed within the participating institutions, but also to the wider educational community. The users that took part in the training programme did profit in several different ways:

Figure 7 The new members’ page


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They participated at the workshops in the needs analysis and thus contribute to the development of use cases and scenarios relevant to their actual needs. Overall, 310 teachers participated at the needs analysis in the partner countries.

During the implementation events overall 648 teachers participated in DigiSkills events and it should be underlined that DigiSkills sessions were very popular among teachers, which signals an opening of the teaching community to New Technologies and their gradual integration to school practice.

In this way, they also gain experience on the use of educational technology in the classroom, and provide interesting classroom experiences for their students. They also gained intercultural awareness through cooperation with partners from different European countries, adding a new dimension to their teaching.

WP5 Evaluation and Quality Assurance

The scope of the Quality Assurance & Evaluation Plan was to establish a strategy as well as a comprehensive schedule of activities to take place in order to evaluate the workshops. The evaluation plan acts as a reference guide for all partners involved in the implementation (WP4). The DigiSkills workshops are evaluated by quantitative web-based questionnaires. The Evaluation & Quality Assurance contains both the validation methodology and tools and appropriate instruments for collecting feedback from the users (e.g. Questionnaires, Evaluation Guidelines, and Reports).

Figure 8 DigiSkills Implementation Activities


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WP6 Dissemination & Networking

The DigiSkills partnership uses specific and personalised indicators to measure the impact of all dissemination activities by the so-called Dissemination Graph. This shared online matrix (Google spread sheet) was developed by EDEN and is maintained and updated by all the partners. When new dissemination activities emerge (e.g. attendance at relevant conferences, developing new synergies with similar initiatives, organising a workshop, release of a new newsletter issue, etc.), the partner in charge adds the activity to the matrix on the right tab, and fills in pre-required information about it (e.g. date, venue, URL, type of contribution, number of participants for an event), therefore this document is always up to date and is constantly enriched. Progress has been and will continue to be followed throughout the entire project lifetime.

WP7 Exploitation

The DigiSkills exploitation plan describes the partners’ project responsibilities, along with the expected results from the consortium partners. Mutual cooperation between the strategic partners will be organised and potential strategic alliances will also be identified. The exploitation plan includes: the identification of the project’s audience and strategic objectives, as well as the project-level and partner-level implementation/exploitation/sustainability objectives and activities.

In DigiSkills project it is proposed that the following principles shall guarantee for a sustainable implementation of the project results:

to build upon the past,

to use resources efficiently in the present,

to account and develop for the future.


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4. Partnerships

The pilot sites will be explored by different partners in different countries: Comenius (P1, P6 & P8), Erasmus (P2, P3 & P9), and Grundtvig (P4, P5 & P7). More specifically:

Figure 9 DigiSkills Partners

Ellinogermaniki Agogi - EA (Greece) is a distinguished partner from the field of educational technology and innovation with extensive experience in project management (lead 30 projects and participated in more than 100) and teacher training as well as long-established access to school communities,

Maria Curie Sklodowska University - MCSU (Poland) is an internationally operating and cooperating university with capacity to provide state-of-the-art information technologies and methodological support to all of our teachers and interested institutions. UCDL takes part in the biggest e-learning initiative that takes place in Poland,

Computer Technology Institute - CTI (Greece) is a research and technology organization focusing on research and development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Particular emphasis is placed on education, by developing and deploying conventional and digital media in education and lifelong learning; administrating and managing the Greek School Network; and supporting the organization and operation of the electronic infrastructure of the Greek Ministry of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religious Affairs and all educational units,


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European Foundation for Quality in E Learning - EFQEL (Belgium) is the largest network on quality in E-Learning in Europe and has members from all over Europe and even beyond Europe. EFQUEL approaches quality in E-Learning from complementary perspectives and develops full-scale services for all educational fields, regional contexts and target groups,

European Distance and E-Learning Network - EDEN (United Kingdom) is the most comprehensive European association in the field of open, flexible, distance and e-learning with 180 institutional members and 1139 individual members representing 416 institutions from 57 countries, covering all Europe,

Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur - BMUKK (Austria) is a Ministry of Education cooperating with school communities, teacher training institutions, NGOs and the labour market, and aiming to provide e-training services to teachers in education with new technologies,

Ynternet.org (Switzerland) is promoting entrepreneurial spirit and equity of chances within the new knowledge society. Its foundation council is composed of directors of superior school and universities of the occidental part of Switzerland,

Confederación Española de Centros de Enseñanza - CECE (Spain) is a non-profit employers´ and professional organization with a wide educational sector in Spain from nursery school to university level that has more than 5.000 Education and training centres among its members,

University of Split, Faculty of Science – USP (Croatia) has a 50-year experience in educating primary and secondary school teachers that reflects itself through a long time research activities, collaboration and research projects supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Technology,

Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education – ISKME (USA) is dedicated to the study, spread, and strategic use of knowledge management in education. ISKME helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create open knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success.

To this end, many different organisations with high quality and unique expertise in their field have decided to join forces in a European effort to propose a scientifically grounded, technological sustainable and organisationally disruptive proposal for the modernization of secondary to higher and adult education pedagogy that will give to all parties involved in education a motivation for change.


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5. Plans for the Future

Project Management (WP1)

The coordinator will keep on monitoring the administrative, final and research activities, using all the means of communication, like meetings, mails, skype meetings, calls. Detailed project meeting minutes for each meeting, describing the agenda and all the decisions taken during the meeting are being held.

Additionally, the Final Report will provide the overall progress and activities of the project, along with an assessment of the achieved project results in respect to the initially set objectives and goals. It will also contain all required by EC information (such as a financial report, a schedule of work carried out, and measures to transfer the project results).

Inventory and Community Building (WP3)

The Methodology on the Development of the DigiSkills Web 2.0 Community (D3.1) the Approaches for integrating best practices content (D 3.2) the Inventory Specification Interface (D 3.3), the DigiSkills Inventory Prototype (D 3.4) as well as a short English version of DigiSkills Inventory manual (D 3.5) have been finalized during the first and half year of the project. Initially the web site of the project developed separately and it was integrated with the inventory via a devoted link. However, during the implementation of the project the consortium concluded that the project site will become much more effective if it is integrated to the inventory. The reasoning was that usually the potential beneficiaries and users visit a project site just to receive general information about the project’s produced results. By integrating the DigiSkills site with the DigiSkills inventory, it is offered to the visitors the opportunity not only to be informed about the project in general but to see in action how the platform is operating and what its offered services are. Thus, the integration is expected to increase not only the site visibility but also the awareness of potential users toward the offered potentials of the DigiSkills inventory. During the remaining one and the half year of the project, the manual will be finalized and translated to all partners’ languages. Also the final version of full functional DigiSkills Inventory Portal will be created and it will be enriched based on pilot users’ comments and the Good Practices that will be uploaded.

Implementation (WP4)

The aim of this work package for the second period of the project is to apply and test the DigiSkills collected good practices through a wide range of experimentation of good practices activities during an implementation period. Through the activities to be carried out in this process, the participating SE, HE and AE teachers will deploy the collected best practices and indicate the more effective approaches. Those best practices to stand out shall be used as the basis for various activities, such as contests, 2 more summer schools, as well as in other parallel events. The consortium


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expects to engage more teachers (648 until now) in the educative actions to be organised. Overall, this work package shall ensure the quality and effectiveness of the best practices to be selected and projected through the DigiSkills repository.

More specifically, the objectives of this Work Package for the next period are the following:

a) to organise more implementation actions aiming to bring teachers together and to assess the selected good practices.

b) to promote the use of innovative teaching and learning practices through specialized actions.

c) to promote collaboration, discussion and exchange of best practices among teachers on a European level.

d) to apply the collected good practices to the constantly expanding network of teachers.

Evaluation and Quality Assurance (WP5)

During the second year of the project lifespan the main interest for the evaluation part concerns the evaluation of the material and the training activities and of course the evaluation of the project’s progress and approach. The Quality Assurance and Evaluation Plan will continue to evaluate the pilot training activities and the validation events, as well as their quality assurance process. The main objective of the workpackage will be to assess the impact of the major intervention designed and implemented in the previous work packages, on the participating school, university and adults communities, and identify barriers to adoption. Evaluation as already decided will have both a formative and summative nature. Evaluation of the implementation will be evaluating the events, the e-learning modules, the impact on participants and the quality of the overall process. The evaluation report should further highlight any inconsistencies or weaknesses in order to be reviewed and handled. Each partner will collect and analyse data from their trial cases in national SE, HE and AE teacher experimentation of good practices activities sessions as well as in experiments, and prepare a report on their experiences based on that data. Moreover consortium will utilise data displays, concept maps, and tables and will illustrate findings of the evaluation. Finally the consortium will calculate descriptive statistics based on the survey data completed by participants at the end of each implementation phase of the project.

Dissemination and Networking (WP6)

For the second year consortium is planning to disseminate the products of the project by publishing more newsletters, presenting the project at the training seminars. At the same time partners will participate to relevant conferences in order to disseminate the project. Also, we are planning to organize the second and the third DigiSkills Summer School for teachers and the Final European Workshop of the project.


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At the end of the project, the Final Dissemination Report will provide information about the overall progress of dissemination activities and the results of the dissemination activities (such as publications and presentations). Constant online presentation and dissemination of the project progress and results will be made available on the DigiSkills web site. The site will gradually present all public results produced by the project, and will be maintained even after the project ends.

The project members plan to bring them forward for public discussion in relevant communities of interested actors. For this purpose, a special European Conference on Digital Competence Skills is planned to be organized during the last six months of the project. A special session of this conference will be devoted on the presentation of the DigiSkills results and recommendations, but another session will be focused on the presentation of results from other related initiatives (such as LLP projects developing, adapting and testing similar topics). Representatives from all types of interested areas will be invited to participate in this dissemination event.

Exploitation (WP7)

The second period will include more activities at the Exploitation work package as far as there will be more activities at the dissemination field. Following the requirements documented in WP2, WP4, and WP5 the Series of Best Practice Guidelines will produce a series of guidelines for the educational community to explore and exploit the benefits of the proposed learning design process. In this framework, a structured set of recommendations will be produced on how learning design processes and methods can be used to provide an engaging educational experience through actual practice.

The guide will be published both electronically (in the web and in a CD-ROM) and conventionally, in full size and in brief. It will analytically describe the developed pedagogical approach and all project outcomes. Its aim is to be a full, systematic, practically useful and directly applicable guide for school teachers who are willing to follow the proposed training programme. Its compilation will be the result of the collaborative effort of teachers, pedagogical experts and trainers.

Also the consortium will create the final version of the initial exploitation plan summarizing the activities, synergies with other research initiatives and strategies that have been adopted with the view to reaching out the targeted users after the funding period of the project. The consortium will establish cooperation with related projects funded by LLP, FP7 and ICT PSP initiatives providing input to and taking into account relevant outcomes as well as collaboration with Initiatives and projects beyond Europe.


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6. Contribution to EU policies

Making eLearning mainstream in the national policies is one of the key actions of the

Digital Agenda for Europe1. Making full use of ICT in Education and Training in Europe is a necessity to effectively modernise education, for all subjects and skills. It also contributes to the innovation potential of Europe, which in turn is crucial for competitiveness and for addressing social challenges. eLearning is no longer seen as a tool for instruction but as a policy instrument, a paradigm for change in education and training. Sustainable change is possible only through the involvement of all stakeholders, i.e. learners, teachers, parents, managers, educational policy makers and the local communities. In the framework of the DigiSkills project will serve as important vehicle of change carrying ideas, supporting the commitment and linking practitioners to research. Change agents and innovative practitioners (early adopters of innovation) will be identified at all levels and within all stakeholder communities. Networking the change agents will secure and speed up the change. At the same time DigiSkills is aligned with the European policies that are related to education and training. The project contributes to the objectives of key EU Policies, Programmes and Treaties that are related to how ICT can help modernize education around Europe. The project plan is taking into account a series of national initiatives in the countries of implementation, that exemplify the opportunities DigiSkills will exploit in the current reform efforts for boosting the practitioner-led agenda forward. DigiSkills by empowering all SE, HE and AE audiences (teachers, students, parents, policy makers, adults returning to higher education, learners entering the workplace) will allow users to formulate groups of interest, share working ideas and projects, discuss issues relevant to their school/university/work activities, and create links between the various roles within the learning communities that go beyond the formal hierarchies and structures. Under this perspective our project will survey the results for providing greater access to innovative teaching and learning methodologies for all and to prepare a community for future participation in lifelong learning but also and into society and the labour market. It will allow SE, HE and AE population to develop the necessary core skills and competencies for an inclusive, creative and sustainable European Information Society. The delivery of the multilingual Inventory in all nine (9) project languages (EL, PO, NL, FR, EN, HU, DE, ES, HR) along with key deliverables and best practices, adapted in the cultural and intercultural settings of targeted users and covering the subject areas of innovative teaching and learning practices built upon the European added value and transferability of products to other countries as well.

1 Ibid. 9


N°. 531300-LLP-1-2012-1-GR-KA3-KA3NW 20 / 21

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Documents

DigiSkills: Network for the enhancement of digital ...eacea.ec.europa.eu/LLp/projects/public_parts/documents/ict/2012/nw... · DigiSkills: Network for the enhancement of digital competence