The rise of new technologies and their omnipresent availability has changed not only the society but also heavily impacted education. The complete knowledge of mankind is only just a smartphone away. This results that in education the transfer of information became less important and the focus shifted to the competences of how to process information and skills. The availability of technologies barely invented a decade or two ago like (usable and affordable) tablet computers and Wifi started the post-PC era. The use of ITC in education is no longer confined to dedicated computer equipped classrooms. The digitalisation in education, supported by myriads of apps, is an unstoppable evolution which only reflects the digitalisation of our daily and professional life. Teachers and schools can barely keep up with the technological development. Many professionals feel submerged by this tidal wave of innovations instead of surfing on the opportunities they provide. The urge of training in ITC supported education has never been so pressing. The expertise in digital education rises quickly in the teaching community, but everybody is still experimenting around, which takes a lot time away from the efforts allotted to content creating. It is very clear that we need to share the experiences and contents in order to be more efficient and productive. This is especially true in small sectors, like the vocational training in the green sector (agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, forestry, pisciculture, floristry…) where dedicated commercial content is scarce. Also the technological and pedagogical deployment in those VET sectors is more complicated, since the teaching is not confined to the classrooms but often takes place outdoors. Since the needs are so manifold in green VET and the urge is so pressing we need to tackle the challenge of digitalisation on an European level. With DIGITALIS (named after Digitalis purpurea, the foxglove, a medicinal or poisonous plant, depends from the dose) we want to create a foundation to this European collaboration which assists school, teachers and students in adopting the digitalisation in their vocational education and training. Seminars and a collection of guidelines should improve the competences of the teachers and help the schools in their digitalisation efforts. A description of the useful apps together with providing ready to use content will be an efficient way to implement digitalisation to the own practice. Complete learning units will illustrate as inspiring practice the digitalisation in green VET. This will all be made available in a database, a showcase accessible to anyone. The aim is not to create a collection of data assembling dust somewhere on a server, but to create a fundament for gathering resources and expertise from green VET schools all over Europe.
When we started to form the idea of the project we discovered that all the partners had the same basic problem: We got access to the latest IT technology, but nobody knew how to use it efficiently in our green VET education. At that time, nobody talked about digitalisation. Since then the development of digitalisation continued at a breathtaking pace. The aim of DIGITALIS was always to assist teachers to keep up with this development, discover the potential and implement the acquired knowledge in the daily teaching routine. Since this exploring, discovering, learning and adapting are also very time consuming we try to pool our resources to achieve our goal.
All participating organizations use tablets or mobile phones in teaching. The digital world is moving very fast, new applications appear in each country every day. So every student, teacher and school faces the challenge to adapt at this digitalisation in education and to solve the problem of how to connect learning as a mental process and using digital tools as methodical tool. A quick search in the internet provide rapidly many possibilities to adapt the pedagogy. But it is very difficult to find solutions fitted to the special needs of VET education, especially to green education where a large amount of the education is outdoors. This sector is also very fast evolving and specialised, which makes it even more difficult to find adapted learning materials. For this reasons it is important that we pool our resources and efforts together in order to tackle this challenges effectively. DIGITALIS focused on green VET and provided a fundament for a European-wide pooling of expertise and resources. It also tried to provide solutions to the challenges proper to green VET, like outdoor training, lack of commercial learning material...