During the COVID19 crisis Hungarian and Romanian teachers are facing challenges that they weren't prepared to solve. The digital competences of educators are on a very wide scale. Some do not manage digital devices as a basic skill, and cannot solve everyday problems with them, while others can implement very diverse digital educational activities. It can also be seen that teachers often try to use the old routines from classrooms during digital education (online testing, writing essays, sending assignments). Furthermore, only a few platforms from several digital pedagogical repertoires are used. There are many training opportunities for educators however, in these trainings, teachers with different abilities start from the same entry-level. This often makes development difficult and can make participants frustrated and stressed. Furthermore, trainings are often organized in bigger cities, training programs do not reach everyone. So before developing the project, we prepared a Need-assessment Questionnaire for our main target group, teachers, to see what would be the most convenient, most effective help for them. The results show that educators ’digital competencies range from a very wide spectrum, from beginners to high-level users in digital transition besides that a significant proportion of them would like to attend free online training. With "Digiloping Teachers" program our goal is to help the digital transition from multiple angles. We want to address the three major groups in the learning process: teachers, students, and schools. In our project we want to develop a comprehensive solution that gives the participants of the learning/teaching process (teacher, student) a helping hand to develop digital competence, to promote the development of a digital resilient society. We are collaborating to design a converging curriculum focused on learning and teaching 21st-century skills at schools. Sharing content on online platforms in every country and training educators in its curricular methodology. Grounded in the European Digital Competence Framework “DigCompEdu”, the initiative aims to drive the innovative use of digital technologies for educative purposes in schools and out-of-school settings as well as its confident, safe, and creative use by students and educators alike. In this process, we would like to build on the experience of international education partners from Estonia, Finland and Romania. We offer teachers a blended learning training course (where the opportunities provided by the internet and digital media and traditional classroom teaching methods are used together) in which they can get to know the possibilities of digital education in an online platform created by Finnish, Estonian, Romanian and Hungarian professional cooperation. We want to implement a multi-stage online training program that will be available to anyone online, eliminating geographical, social, and time-management obstacles. The unique and special feature of our training is that it starts with a self-assessment entry-level so that the educator can measure his/her own starting point and select the appropriate professional module with the help of a mentor. The professional modules offer three different levels of training programs (novice, independent user, proficient/expert), which provide opportunities for real innovation. And at the third level, it prepares teachers to mentoring others with lower digital competences. For this purpose we will develop a Mentor Guidebook to help proficient teachers on becoming a multiplicator. By exploiting the two-way nature of the democratic learning process, we will use the potential of students ’existing competencies. Today’s high school and elementary school students are the "digital natives". The misconceptions of educators about them have already been eliminated, but it is a fact that they handle digital devices much more boldly and openly than their teachers. We will use this potential in an on-site flipped training project with their teachers in Finland and a national follow-up. To this end, our initiative provides learning and teaching material that fosters a learning-by-playing and learning-by-doing approach and promotes interdisciplinary, project-based learning focused on real-life challenges. Renewing the teaching profession is to recognize that the traditional role of pedagogues and pedagogical activities are changing. Teaching is being replaced by learning and knowledge building based on digital tools, the frontal method is replaced by (digital) pedagogy focusing on collaboration and problem-solving. In our program, we place a particular emphasis on the demonstration and use of methods and techniques that can make the teaching profession attractive as they offer 21st-century solutions. We would highlight the very different best practices of our partner countries with which we aim to operate on a self-sustaining and self-stimulating basis after the end of the project.
Based on these needs we defined the following objectives: - Help the digital transition from multiple angles. The 3 major groups addressed in the project: teachers, students and schools. The participating organizations include NGOs, universities and for-profit organizations experienced of different levels of digital education, digital transition and extensive best practices. - Create an international digital platform (IO1) that, considering local specificities, helps to share knowledge, build knowledge, community building, and methodological and technical training. - Building knowledge about how digital technologies can be used to enhance and innovate education and training. -Highlighted the very different best practices of our partner countries by creating different training modules at 3 different levels. - Operate on a self-sustaining and self-stimulating basis after the end of the project due to their digitization. - Develop an e-learning course for teachers on digital competence development, attitude-changing campaigns (training packages related to self-assessment and self-development), soft skills development, a methodological package suitable for the development of life skills, methodological manuals, video tutorials
During the COVID-19 crisis it was revealed that the level of digital competences of Hungarian and Romanian teachers, students and parents are way below the European average. Educators have not been methodologically prepared for the digital transformation, either if it is voluntary or forced. The Coronavirus crisis strengthened the following difficulties in education: - Sudden and forced need for digital transformation: - Teachers and students did not get enough help in this situation - Low level of digital literacy of students - The dominance of the frontal teaching method (teacher is speaking, students are listening) - Limited foreign language knowledge, which severely restricts participation in international teacher platforms and teacher groups. Our need-assessment research showed that teachers and schools need guidance through this hard process of digital transmission which can support autonomous learning, individual paths, self-management of time and space during the learning process. These needs led us to the application and the idea of digital competence development in a self-guided way in an LMS.