DIGITAL IN-DEMAND DICTIONARY

Digital in-demand soft skills dictionary

 

Short-term joint staff training report

Within the Erasmus plus project ‘Soft skills-key to career success, 2020-1-BG01-KA229-079053_2, the short term joint staff training meeting took place in Comiso, Italy, from 13 to 17 July 2021.

Ten teachers including one principal, coming from Bulgaria, Romania and Poland met the Italian teachers’ delegation from Istituto d’Istruzione Superiore ‘Giosuè Carducci’ after a long pandemic period which made it necessary to reshape the previously scheduled meetings.

The aim of this transnational meeting was that of sharing good practices in “Teaching Methods for Inspiring the Students of the Future”.

During the first day of workshop, in respecting Cooperative learning and Peer tutoring approaches, the Italian group presented all partners the idea of using a brand new application called ‘ App-Erasmus’. This application was created by the Italian partners by thinking about a way of involving either students or teachers in building up a sort of logbook of our Erasmus adventure , by keeping a record about places, traditions and habits shown by the partners taking part to this project. App-Erasmus will grow up during the remaining time of the project and the next mobilities. Inside it, the puzzle pieces showing the flags of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Italy represent the partner countries. The hosted partners could easily download it through a file shared by Google drive. By clicking on the flag of each country it will be possible to travel virtually through traditions, art and customs of each partner country, which students and teachers can experience themselves during their mobilities.

The idea was that of moving from the virtual to the real, from the pandemic time of imaging how to move into a better world, to a real world of great things to do for the future. Students guided by the teachers have to upload news, music, pictures, videos about all those aspects.

During their call conferences, partners specifically had asked Italians to explain them how to use Thinglink, an education technology platform that makes it easy to augment images, videos, and virtual tours with additional information and links. Actually, Thinglink was the application used to present a video about introducing Italian students to the project members, the presentation video had been shared in Facebook and E-twinning.

So, on the second day of workshop, Thinglink platform was introduced by using a tutorial video. After creating a Google account, each partner guided by Mrs Zago, who showed the peers all the tools contained in the application, could practise in creating their own products. In the end , everybody displayed the results of their research, shared opinions and made questions that could help the entire group.

On the third and last day of workshop, partners discussed about "Survival kit", decided about possible dates for next mobilities and shared clear rules regarding students accommodation, transportation, costs. Those rules will be written by the leading country in this project , Bulgaria, shared, accepted and signed by all the partner countries before mobilities. We used technology to record, presented videos about the hosting and hosted schools, submitted a final evaluation and suggestion questionnaire online for recording the outcome of the meeting . We found many benefits and challenges of peer tutoring for teachers and students. As next mobility to Romania, from 3 to 9 October, will include students in Romania, the leader of Romanian group , Mr Dragomir suggested about what to work on, involving students before moving to Ploiesti. As a matter of fact, one of the planned activity in developping life skills will be a fair in Ploiesti exposing products created by partners responding to principles of creativity, originality, sustenability. The fair will also be a competition and the best product will win a prize.

Next scheduled mobilities will be:

Bulgaria 7-13 November

Italy 12-19 March

Poland 3-9 April

Romania 1-7 June

This schedule could be changed if the pandemic situation will request it.

Besides workshops, as shown in the agenda previously presented to Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish partners, they took part to a guided tour of the town of Comiso, visited Gulfi winery where they could learn about winemaking systems and taste some of the most popular wine produced in the South-eastearn part of Sicily, experienced Chiaramonte Gulfi extra virgin olive oil served on bread, they had a typical Sicilian lunch at Ganzeria farm, they visited the Castle of Donnafugata and spent the last day at the seaside where at Kaukana Sailing Club, visited the fisherman village of Punta Secca and saw Casa Montalbano, where the famous tv serial is set.

Three days, a short but very fruitful time in order to decide how to cooperate, work and involve students in the process of developping life skills and make them successful people in their career. The impression was positive as we had been working as a team, sharing experiences and helping each other in finding solutions to problems. The evaluation questionnaire will tell us about strengths and weaknessess of this first meeting, but we are already satisfied as Italian group gave its best in hospitality, as the Mediterranean, Greek origin has handed down from father to son.