27th August 2020 from 15:00 to 16:30 Central European Time (Brussels).

We will open the 5th Pan-European Conference on Distance Teaching with an inspiring key note session:

• Mojca Osvald: Problem Solving Lessons by de Bono's Thinking Tools.

Mojca Osvald is a high school teacher committed to teaching HOW to think instead of what to think. Among others she uses de Bono's thinking tools to inspire parallel, constructive, cooperative and creative thinking in her classes. She likes to experiment with innovative teaching ideas. Recently, together with her daughter, she published a detective book for children in which a mysterious case is solved by de Bono thinking tools.

The second part of the conference will be devoted to presenting distance teaching best practice. If you would like to present your practice, welcome to apply as presenter. Anyone who would like to present their best practice in distance teaching is invited to give a 7-minute presentation. We kindly ask you to inform us about your presentation till 14. 8. 2020 via the application form. After signing in for active participation, we will send you more information on how to prepare your presentation.
 
All the case presenters will receive a certificate of oral presentation.

The online conference will be held in English and is free of charge. All the participants will get a certificate of attendance.

Active support of the conference
All participants who are willing to summarize the conference and write down the most important information on the topics in their mother tongue are also welcome to participate. This will help your colleagues who cannot attend the conference or may not speak English to be informed about the key insights.

Participants
To participate the conference please register. The number of the participants is limited and we close down the application when we reach the maximum number of registrations.

Become a member of the Facebook group Pan-European Conference on Digital Education and benefit even more.

The role of the Pan-European Conference on Distance Teaching is to make best practice visible so that other teachers can use them.
 
Let’s create new opportunities together!

​Looking forward to host you on 27th August 2020 from 15:00 to 16:30 Central European Time (Brussels).
 
Kind regards,
Blanka, Monika, Petra and Andrej
www.erasmuspluscourses.com

The final programme of the 4th Pan-EU Conference on Digital Teaching - for KINDERGARTENS.

Kindly invited! Please also share to your teacher colleagues from kindergartens.
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Free registration required: https://forms.gle/pZ7zX9zqjsTPJyEm6

Our trainer Milica Vukadin is really productive with creating various useful content for digital education. In this Padlet you can find 32 different formative assessment activities.

Thanks to Marta Torreiro, a participant of our international learning community, all the activities also have a Spanish translation.

Access the Padlet with all the activities here and try them in your digital or face-to-face classroom.

On the Erasmus+ teacher training course From Distance to Blended Learning we devote one whole day to formative assessment in a digital education. Join, practice and get new ideas for your subjects.

In this blog we just want to remind that the root cause of students' drop-out lies in their unfulfilled psychological needs. They don't see school as a secure place, in which they would feel appreciated.

Every school can build their capacity to reduce drop-out and prevent early school leaving. Robert Reasoner developed a useful framework, which can remind us on different perspectives when thinking about early school leaving.

In developing tools and activities to prevent early school leaving we will be successful, if we address all the psychological needs (Reasoner's framework):

• security: I know I am safe;
• identity: I know who I am;
• belonging: I know others accept me;
• purpose: I know what I want to achieve;
• competence: I know I am capable.

Psychological needs and participative learning methods are at heart of our Erasmus+ course on preventing early school leaving. Check the course programme and apply to build your school capacity for working with students at risk of dropping out.

In this blog you will find a link to a rich resource pool of tools to prevent early school leaving of students. The tools are available in 4 different languages.

The Cross-sectoral Cooperation Focused Solutions for Preventing Early School Leaving (backronym: CroCooS – Prevent Dropout!) was an international project aimed at preventing dropout. The general aim of the CroCooS project was to contribute to the specification and the applicability of an institutional early warning system (EWS) for preventing early leaving from education and training, by identifying elements of EWS.

The projected resulted in a rich resource pool for teachers, counsellors and headmasters who want to build their school capacity to reduce early school leaving.

Find resources in 4 languages: English, Hungarian, Serbian and Slovene:

• The Resource Pool of CroCooS offers a huge variety of professional materials, professional literature for professionals, experts and researchers about the key elements of preventing dropout and early school leaving explored during the project period of CroCooS. Using the thematic tags you can find related contents.
• The Guidelines for developing an institutional early warning system (EWS) is intended to help the work of schools who are about to build an early warning system for preventing and reducing dropout in their institution.
• The CroCoos Toolkit is a collection of practical solutions aiming at the prevention of dropping out.

Find resources on the project webpage here: CroCooS.

In the Erasmus+ Key Action 2 entitled CREATOR we contributed in preparing teaching materials for teachers and learning workbook for students.

Completely open handbook is available in 6 different languages: English, German, Italian, Croatian, Romanian and Slovene. Get the handbook here.

Entrepreneurship education has long been focused on a theoretical approach, preparing a thorough business plan and development of a company in the office. In the last decade, there has also been a shift, towards a more experiential approach in this field, based on developing ideas, practical methods, and tools, fieldwork and development of a business model. The experiential teaching of entrepreneurship has the potential to bridge the gap between the worlds of education and work.

The handbook is designed as a teaching material that enables teachers and trainers to use experiential methods and tools to teach their students and mentees how to develop and start implementing their business idea. It is prepared in a way that everyone can use it to guide, train or mentor young people and job seekers, to help them develop an entrepreneurial mindset and enable them to enter the job market as more qualified employees or as a self-employed person, an entrepreneur. We believe that young people have the potential to successfully solve current and future challenges in the world. We just need to provide assistance and guidance based on a practical, experiential approach.

This handbook was developed within the scope of the project “CREATOR – Experimental Approach to Teaching Entrepreneurship through Workplace Training”. The methodology, practical activities and didactical material for teaching entrepreneurship presented in this handbook were tested and validated at the train-the-trainers entrepreneurial training, led by STEP Institute in April 2018 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It enabled teachers and trainers to practically experience the whole process in order to ensure that they will all use the same approach to the implementation of local training with teachers and students in their countries. However, the handbook is written in a way that it can be easily understood and used by anyone who works with students (or other individuals) and who is at least a little bit interested in entrepreneurship.
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Peter Drucker said: »Entrepreneurship is neither science nor art. It is a practice.« And practice makes perfect. 

On 9th July 2020 we hosted our first Online Teacher Intervision session. 7 participants from different countries together with a moderator Maria Grecu discussed relevant teaching challenges. Participants who are ready to learn and building their competencies in the middle of holidays. 😊

Intervision is a form of a peer coaching. Teachers from different backgrounds come together working as a team to answer some questions or a problem related to their work. With different cultural, language, geographical, educational and teaching level background we ensure diverse thinking regarding the issues, which is needed for creative solutions.

Among various topics such as project learning, monitoring of math students during their homework in distance teaching, how to motivate students for math, motivation in online teaching, special needs students in distance teaching participants chose two to discuss in depth: student motivation and special needs.
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Some feedbacks from participants:

• I like it, because we are peers with similar problems;
• I like different points of view because people are from different countries;
• Cooperative learning is beneficial to all of us

International learning and collaboration among teachers lead to higher quality of teaching in 21st century.
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Thank you all for a wonderful collaboration.

Outbreak caused by COVID -19 showed that circling of teaching ideas across countries is very much needed. A strong network among teachers fosters a better impact on students, a sense of belonging, willingness to take risks, teacher identity and a growth mindset.

Many teachers made digital teaching really effective. Our role as the Erasmus+ courses provider is to make them visible. At Primera we have decided to take the initiative and organize a Pan-European Zoom conference to enable teachers across Europe to share their best practices in distance teaching with their colleagues.

To achieve this mission we:

• organize online Pan-European Conference on Digital Education every month, usually on the last Thursday;
• administer a Facebook group Pan-European Conference on Digital Education - with love to transfer best practice among teachers and engage members in meaningful conversations about digital education. The group is also a starting platform for different free events for teachers such as teacher intervision and presentations of innovative teaching strategies. Welcome to join and contribute to the group.

By sharing best practices, we can help our colleagues and receive help and support from them. 

Final programme of the conference announced.