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The Summer School 2014 has been successfully completed!

The Open Discovery Space International Academy 2014 took place in Marathon, Greece from 13/7 to 18/7/2014. Overall, 25 teachers and school leaders from both Primary and Secondary Education attended the Summer School, coming from Serbia, France, UK, Finland, Greece, Portugal, Romania, Cyprus and Turkey.  Twenty-one of these participants were granted scholarships  from the Open Discovery Space project, including the two winners of the Eratosthenes Experiment photo contest and the two contest winners, while 3 participants had received grants from the ERASMUS+ programme


The aim of this year's Summer School was to support school innovation and to train teachers and school leaders to promote the development of their schools into open learning communities, and thus improve the quality of all aspects of schooling. Also, the Academy was intended to promote more flexible and creative ways of learning by improving the way educational content is produced, accessed and used, by fostering sharing and collaboration, and by making the teacher the core node and change leader of a developing community. The overall approach is to promote educational change and modernization of school education by empowering school staff to monitor the school's needs and to take initiative for bringing innovative practices in all areas of schooling. The course, which extended in 26 hours, combined a series of presentations, lectures and hands-on activities. The preparation of the participants included the design of an extensive action plan for the development of their school, as well as the preparation of an educational scenario that included the active engagement of parents.

The key note presentations on the opening day of the course covered a wide array of subjects, from Astronomy, Quantum Physics teaching and Geospatial thinking to introducing innovation in schools and were delivered respectively by Rosa Doran (NUCLIO), Frans Renaat (Limburg Catholic University College), Marinos Kavouras (University of Athens) and Nikitas Kastis (MENON Network). On the second day, after an introduction to the course the participants interviewed each other in pairs, in order to identify their own professional skills, as well as their position in their school as a live community and the aspects of their schools that they wish to change. To the same direction they also worked in groups in order to exchange ideas and views about the profiles and needs of their schools, to identify differences and similarities across countries, and to refine the goals for the development of their schools as those were described in their action plans.

The third day of the course focused on educational design with the aim of fostering students’ competences with the use of digital tools/content. The training framework and the learning design approach of TRANSIt project has been adopted.

The ODS portal and authoring tools were demonstrated and the participants were guided into uploading their educational scenarios on the Summer School 2014 digital community. The aspect of student variability was also addressed in a lecture by Dr Alan Bruce (ULS), as a crucial factor for school innovation that the participants could include in their educational scenarios. The final scenarios represent a wide range of curriculum areas and also include interdisciplinary elements, covering Maths, Astronomy, Chemistry, Technology, Art, Career Guidance and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Finally, the participants presented their educational scenarios to the group on the last day of the course, which are publicly available through the Summer school digital community.

Date: 

Monday, July 28, 2014
 

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