The key area which our school wanted to achieve was the improvement of whole staff competencies in educational technology. This meant developing knowledge of different methods of digital and online tools by teachers attending relevant trainings through different organisations around Europe which were not offered locally. Developing ICT competence in the European context was seen as important. Trainings abroad match our school’s international profile and desire to maintain an international dimension in our teaching, materials and networks. We wanted to network with colleagues from other EU countries and maintain/develop intercultural understanding. Through the ICT-related trainings, the goal was to: impact teacher’s own ICT skills, confidence and motivation; students' learning and digital competence; other staff members’ interest and knowledge of digital methods; as well as enhancing our school’s ICT curriculum and resources. In this way the pedagogy at our school would be better integrated with digital tools. We hoped to cover as many different fields in ICT as possible according to the school’s needs to develop the school’s curriculum, teaching and didactic methods, usage of ICT for communications, and the general quality of the school’s level of digitalization.
We decided to apply for this project during an educational technology team meeting. We brainstormed how we could address our city’s and school’s annual goal of digitalization and ICT skills and develop our school’s ICT competencies accordingly. We decided that if teachers received more training in educational technology, the increased knowledge and skills would benefit the students, other staff and the curriculum. Training in ICT would also motivate teachers to integrate the use of more digital technologies in their lessons.