A kick-off meeting in the city of Wolves
We live in a digitalised world. It influences every aspect of our lives. One of them are schools and educational facilities. Teachers, students and parents should receive proper support and guidelines in order to be active and responsible participants of the digitalisation process. Therefore, a project called Digital Literacy in the Digitalised era: supporting teachers through a whole-school approach (MeLDE) has been initiated by five European organisations.
An official kick-off meeting took place in Wolverhampton, UK – a city of Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, commonly known as Wolves – and was hosted by the leaders of the project University of Wolverhampton. There, partners from Greece (Demokritos), Cyprus (Emphasys Centre, Antenna) and Germany (Bürgerhaus Bennohaus) met in order to discuss the upcoming three years of the project. The participants discussed first Intellectual Output – decided about some deadlines and division of tasks. What is more, the date for the next transnational meeting has been set and will take place in Münster, Germany in April 2019.
The aims of MeLDE project are:
- development of relevant and high-quality skills and competences which are not often included in formal education,
- open education and innovative practices in the digital era, by offering open and free access to the tools to be developed both for participation in the MeLDE programme and for online assessment and validation of the skills acquired,
- strengthening of teacher profiles through offering professional development course and educational pack to support teaching and learning of media literacy for digital citizenship. This will also be achieved through the introduction of evidence-based data, benchmarks and indicators built into the framework to be developed, and constant monitoring procedures to ensure acquisition of competences and skills. In addition, quality youth work is promoted through the new interactive material, as well as the assessment tool which will follow students' progress.
The project promotes the following Erasmus + Sector Priorities:
- further strengthening key competences in school education (especially literacy, numeracy and digital) including common methodologies for introducing those competences in curricula, as well as for acquiring, delivering and assessing the learning outcomes of those curricula; promoting validation of non-formal and informal learning, and offering flexible and permeable learning pathways,
- introducing systematic approaches to, and opportunities for, the initial and continuous professional development of teachers, trainers and mentors in schools (transferable to other settings), with a focus on developing effective digital, open and innovative education and pedagogies.
The project is supported by the European Union's Erasmus + Programme.
Beata Jaranowska
