The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting heavily on education and training systems. In highly difficult circumstances, it has accelerated the digital transformation and triggered rapid, large-scale change. Covid-19 has demonstrated that digital education is not a marginal issue but a central component of learning, teaching and assessment in the 21st century. In this context, digital competence should be a core skill for all educators and training staff and should be embedded in all areas of teacher professional development, including initial teacher education. Educators should be empowered to adopt innovative methods; engage in peer learning and share their experiences. A trusted digital education ecosystem requires high-quality content, user-friendly tools, value-adding services and secure platforms that maintain privacy and uphold ethical standards. Accessibility, inclusiveness and learner-centred design are vital. Digitools project aims to contribute the development of European digital educational content to promote the highest pedagogical and educational quality and improve the digital teaching skills and competences of teachers. Raising the quality and inclusiveness of education and training systems and the provision of digital skills for all during the digital transitions is of strategic importance for the EU as to Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2017)(DEAP). The Digitools project aims to develop the competencies and capacities of all stakeholders in education, students, parents, teachers and school leaders. Education leaders play a key role in digital education. They need to understand how and where digital technologies can enhance education; provide appropriate resources and investment; empower educators; learn from best practice and support relevant organisational change and a culture that values and rewards innovation and experimentation. Education and training systems need to evolve and adapt and this requires all players, including institutional leadership and decision makers in policy, to lead this change. The Digitools Project partnership includes 8 partners from 5 partner countries. The governorship of İstanbul is the coorinator organisation. It has been planned to realize 1 transnational project meeting in each country, 1 LTT in Turkey, 1 ME in each partner country. With these purposes, we will develop 4 intellectual outputs: 1)My Digital Class 2)Assessment and Evaluation Compass 3)Teachers As Mentors Guidebook 4)White Paper: Recommendations for Capacity Building in Digital Education With the products developed in the Digitools project: -Skills and competences of teachers to design and deliver digital training who teach Science, Mathematics and English at middle level will be developed. They will be provided ready-made digital training materials, digital assessment tools for the selected classes. -Digital mentoring skills of teachers will be developed to motivate their students to learn in digital education. -Students studying at grade 1 in middle schools (age 11-14) will be provided digital training for Science, Mathematics and English classes and a platform based on gamification and that they can reach their classes everywhere. Their skills to learn digitally will be improved. -Training organisations, institutions, and decision makers will be provided recommendations on how to promote digitalization in their organisations.. -Parents will be provided a roadmap on how to contribute to the learning of their children.
We wanted to reach all the goals defined in the project. We aimed both to create learning and teaching resources for teachers and students and also imrpove their skills. We aimed to share field knowledge and research experience through active participation of a group of academicians who are all experts in their own fields, Maths, Science, and English education particularly in the topics related to the integration of technology into the educational contexts, creating digital tools and platforms to be used for in-class and out-of-class activities by teachers and students, and training teachers in doing so.
Digital skills of the teachers and different forms and methodologies for е-learning have been a key focus in the activities for the last decade, long before the COVID crisis emerged. We aimed to enhance the technological skills of teachers in our institutions due to the experience of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, increase the ability of these institutions to provide effective distance learning, and optimise the skills of students in accessing and managing information, as well as in their self-learning capacity in the digital context, thanks to the advanced teaching techniques that educators can offer. We also targeted to improve online mentoring skills of teachers post Covid-19 and their knowledge of online tools already available to access, to provide them with a tool to offer their pupils online digital tasks which are aligned to the curriculum and organised according to subject and learning outcomes (as well as the facility to create their own digital tasks within the platform). We aimed also to create a platform in which they can create their own activities within the platform and, by providing engaging digital learning activities aligned to the curriculum and facilitating the selection of suitable tools that enable the creation of highly customizable and reusable activities. We brought partners with different backgrounds in this project. We wanted to bring them together to contribute through the involvement of academicians who are all experts in the fields of mathematics, science and English language education and experienced in research practices and experts with diffeernt background. More specifically, as stated in the project proposal, we bring in our extensive experience in: a) producing, implementing and evaluating (face-to-face, digital, online and blended learning) materials for mathematics, science and English language education, b) training teachers of mathematics, science and English, and c) developing, implementing and evaluating online/digital education programs. Doing so, we support teachers, students, and policy makers in adapting to the requirements of the Digital Era, whose effects start to be felt closely during/after the COVID-19 pandemic.