Written by Simona Ferrari and Gabriele Giampieri
The kick-off meeting of the Erasmus+ “Check & Design” project was held over 26th-27th November 2020 on virtual platform due to Covid-19 situation.
All the upper secondary schools officially belonging to the partnership and coming from Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Italy and Spain attended the meeting together with the educational digital tools creator Archilabò, official partner of the project.
The overview started with a reflection on the European Union efforts on tackling fake news from 2015 on, the lacks recorded at European level concerning digital education at school, the gender divide and the mismatch between digital skills and the role upper secondary schools can play in Europe.
Objectives, activities and target groups were clearly mentioned as well as the type of stakeholders we aim to address our products to.
Particular attention was reserved to the explanation of the Joint Staff Training Event as fundamental moment for the Check&Design project.
Concerning the Outputs, Prof. Ferrari provided a first insight within the MOOC creation pathways and its main objectives as well as deployment modalities. As first step UCSC-CREMIT will design an assessment tool to recognise teachers and students digital habits, information literacy and critical thinking making available a measurable scale to detect the predisposition and frequency of habits towards online news fruition.
The final Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) will be designed and tested in order to enhance teachers’ and students’ ability to spot fake news, trace back the sources of information, understand the information spreading processes and promote a responsible use of the internet. The output will be digital, as it will be based on actual examples of fake news, questions, interactive simulations, and case studies that will be included in the tool.
The toolkit (second output of the project) will be composed by an overview of digital open methodologies applied on school environment with a focus on digital textbook creation.
The first step of the realisation will be cared by Archilabò who will be responsible for the development of the structure and layout of the Toolkit. It will require a deep desk research to overview several instruments freely available and divided per objectives, methodologies, learning outcomes, activities. At the same time the School teachers will deploy a research concerning Eurocities working group on Culture that will be later transferred as educational contents into digital textbooks by the students.
The third Output, the European Digital Teachers Curriculum is a policy-recommendation guideline proposing an innovative digital curriculum for secondary school teachers fostering the competences, tools, learning outcomes and assessments European teachers should undertake to deliver updated digital skills to their students.
The meeting provided also the opportunity to deepen the financial and administrative rules and provisions.
Budget structure, headings and reporting methods have been shown as well as the activity to boost the dissemination and promotion of the project.
Over the next months the first versions of the 3 Outputs will be developed by the partnership and an assessment of upper secondary school students’ digital basic skills will be achieved.
The 2nd project meeting is set in Budapest (June 2021) providing a flagship event to share the efforts among the partners and coordinate the work at European and local level.
A landmark 4-days training will be held in Barreiro (PT) (October 2021) in order to share the first version of the MOOC and the Toolkit for digital textbook creation in order to let all the organisations involved implement the local pilots over the months ahead. The pilots will allow the project to reach beneficiaries (upper secondary school teachers and students) and test the innovative side of the outputs on the ground, improving the digital information literacy of the main target-groups and stakeholders.
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