Urve Aja
Project coordinator (Estonia)
It has become an ordinary saying that in contemporary school teachers can’t teach using 18th century methods. Of course, the past has shown us the path to the future and given possibilities to develop not only new approaches for teaching but also new technologies. The world we are living in is changing rapidly, revealing new demands and expectations especially to people just entering job market. For this reason we created the project “Learn in Today to Manage it Tomorrow”.
The title of the project reflects its content: teachers within the project create digital study materials that support the development of five key-competencies such as intercultural competence, program-based thinking, virtual cooperation, transdisciplinarity and design-thinking. These materials are tested with students and according to the students’ feedback changes are made into materials.
In the academic year 2019/2020 schools faced another challenge – the spread of a deadly virus throughout the world put the whole world on hold. In this period teachers felt the real need for those materials in order to develop through them the above-mentioned competencies in students. Ability to work effectively in teams in virtual environment, ability to transfer data into smaller concepts and build algorithms, ability to transfer and use knowledge and skills acquired in different subjects, ability to see the problem and to solve it – all these competencies came in hand for students as well as for teachers.
Lesson plans, study materials created for and tested with students, articles written for colleagues based on the experience – this is the result of our project that we are eager to share with our colleagues from other countries. We will be happy if all of it will have use or will give a good kick for new ideas.