Improving the digital competence in adults, both for teachers and students

In times of digitalization and elevated migration movements all over Europe, national and international organisations are making efforts to face these challenges, specifically in the context of the IDCA project, with respect to education. Emerging needs to involve elder/digitally inexperienced students as well as involve immigrant students in today's education create challenges for educational institutions. This implies the modernisation of digital based learning and consequent development of new guidelines and practical implementation of existing tools. The IDCA project was created in order to face these needs and to develop a new approach to overcome the digital gap by modernising and improving the level of educational quality. In this context, the proposed project was expected to generate different levels of impact through the use of its outputs on the participants and organisations both during and after the project. The main participants in the project were three schools from Sweden, Spain and Lithuania. The project directly involved around 15 teachers and 50 students, and indirectly has an impact on ca. 35 teachers and ca. 1000 students. The participating teachers and students were selected based on the objectives of the project, with particular focus on older and immigrant students. This project aimed at improving the digital competence in adults, both for teachers and students. That was achieved following two working lines: The organisations shared good practices in the usage of ICT technologies in class and in the digital literacy of adults. We have analysed and reflected upon the best practices to improve the digital competence. Using a Project-based learning methodology, the participants elaborated digital materials to describe our “Technological history”. The aim has been that participants lose their fear to use ICT and reflect on the way technology has changed their lives. In several learning activities, teachers and students learnt to use digital tools, such as Voicethread, Powerpoint, Publisher, Movie Maker, Padlet, Piktochart, Google Drive, and Skype, to elaborate presentations, digital walls and videos to explain their technological history. Overall, the project had an impact on teacher and student participants as well as the participating organisations through the learning of digital tools and social media. Students, that were previously vulnerable to the digital gap, lost their fear of ICT and learned digital tools that they can use as students, workers and citizens. Moreover, as a direct outcome from the project, the participating organisations plan to improve digital competence and to include ICT in the daily life of the schools, which will have an impact on all the students of the schools. All the results and outcomes from the project were shared on a common Blog, on the home pages of the participating organizations, as well as EPALE and Facebook.