1. First of all, it was about making the overall social trend of digitization and its consequences tangible. To this end, various visits were made to Estonia, one of the pioneers in the field of digitization. Under the keyword "e-Estonia", Estonia has been focusing on the consistent digitization of all state activities and society as a whole for some time. The participants should be able to estimate how society and the labor market will change in the future. 2. As part of digitization, our working environment will change within a very short time. With good qualifications, these changes offer the opportunity to restructure management tasks within the school. The project was intended to show the participants options based on best-practice examples in Estonia that can then be implemented at the vocational schools in Lower Franconia. 3. Digital teaching concepts and media competence should become an integral part of the school culture of the Lower Franconian vocational schools in order to optimally prepare the trainees for the digitized society. The project was intended to give the participants new impetus through class visits, work shadowing and exchange with local digitization experts. 4. Due to the positive experiences of the Erasmus + supported projects that have been carried out by the government of Lower Franconia since 2013 on the subject of "quality development" in Finland, Malta, Ireland and South Tyrol, there was an urgent desire on the part of the participants to also Seizing the opportunities of a stay abroad in order to be able to benefit again from an exchange with an experienced partner in other European countries.
As already mentioned in the application under my predecessor S. Weyres, the continuous and systematic further and advanced training of teachers represents an essential component of the internationalization strategy of the Lower Franconia government. This project, in cooperation with INNOVE/Harno in Tallinn, aimed precisely within this framework at improving the skills of the 43 participants in terms of linguistic, digital, didactic, methodical and intercultural skills. Against the background of the digital transformation of our society and school landscape, the project specifically served to qualify the responsible staff at vocational schools for the digital future in the education sector. The project made an important contribution to the quality development of schools in the field of digitization, since it was aimed at members of the school supervisory board and school management and, more specifically, at teachers in the field of school IT and quality management. The project consisted of two flows, which were to take place one year apart in 2019/2020, although the flows ultimately had to be postponed to November 2022 and May 2023 due to the corona pandemic.