Impossible is possible !!
We did it! From January 25-29, 2021 the online teacher training and the Kick-Off meeting of the Erasmus+ KA 2 ERASDG- Education Requires Appliance of SDGs took place.
At the beginning we were very sceptic about having these activities online. We were afraid to miss some of the important skills, and the social relations among partners. But we tried to find some positive sides of running it online. First of all, we haven’t been traveling, at the same time we reduced carbon footprint caused by different sources of transportation. Secondly, due to online activities we could make it open for more teachers. At the beginning we have planned it for 8 teachers, but at the end we had 50 active and motivated teachers who participated in our training! Of course at the start we had some problems to connect all to the platform Canvas – used for the training, but after a few hours all participants were there and everybody knew how to use it. After this, the training went very smoothly, without any obstacles.
The project is coordinated by Green Academy in Denmark. Our 9 partners are coming from 8 different countries (Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Denmark and Romania). AERES Groep is one of the partner in this project. In running of this training, they engaged 2 lecturers and 3 students who have been facilitating our training all the way through.
After one week of training our teachers have learned to:
- coach their students how to consume and produce responsibly (SDG 12)
- coach their students how to adapt to climate change (SDG 13)
- coach their students regarding boundary-crossing skills
- empower the students and to coach them towards increased self-efficacy
- involve the world of work in communal problem-solving of shared environmental issues
- apply innovative, learner-centred pedagogical approaches based on real-life problems
- communicate better in English.
- exchange good practices related to sustainability at international level.
The guidelines document, as one of the Intellectual Output will be soon ready, and it will be used by teachers to run the planned workshops.
In order to achieve all competencies we have been singing, dancing, listening to the lectures, making quizzes, doing homework, working in groups online and offline, reading a story to each other, presenting our ideas, exchanging of good practices, giving feedback and drinking a local beer (or wine) 🙂
We learned a lot about the content, but also about ourselves. Our houses were open for all. Last but not least, we made friends, trust me it is also possible during the online activities top!
Looking into teachers’ evaluation, 79 % of teachers rated the event as excellent, and the rest 21 % as good. No one was negative about the course. Project coordinators will look in more detail into evaluation in order to improve the next online activity, that is going to be a student workshop.
During the online Kick-Off meeting for all project coordinators, we went through necessary tools to be used for project management. All partners are on one the same page now. We also planned the next activity. After the good experience with online teacher training, we decided to have an online workshop for students, in case we will be not able to travel. We will focus on the positive side of the online activity, what will be the added value to our project by running this online?
Thank you all for your active participation.
Read more about our project on: www.erasdg.eu and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ERASDG-Education-Requires-Appliance-of-SDGs-111969593970148
Thank you, EUROPEA International for sharing it 🙂
Acknowledgements: many thanks to Karolina (DK) 🙂
Photo: from Karolina (DK)
