Adult Basic Education Digital Literacy
Start: 01-11-2020 – End: 31-10-2022
Project Reference: 2020-1-DE02-KA204-007706
EU Grant: 299947 EUR
Programme: Erasmus+
Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices
Action Type: Strategic Partnerships for adult education
Summary
Across Europe 55 million people aged from 15 to 65 (technical report PIAAC, 2013) struggle with reading and writing and are, thus, unable to be a part of Global Village. Operating instructions, product packaging and package inserts – everyday life becomes a permanent challenge without sufficient reading and writing skills. People with reading and writing difficulties need a lot of strength and creativity to get along. They often develop sophisticated strategies so that their problem is no longer noticeable at school, at work, in a sports club, when shopping, when visiting a doctor and even among family and friends. As a result, they often feel excluded from social, cultural and political life. The quick development of digital technologies, which get more complex from one year to another leaves also those behind who was actually supposed to use those technologies widely. Using online banking, health apps or finding and understanding information on the internet suddenly becomes a challenge. Neither reading, writing nor mastering digital applications works well with low literacy. Adult basic education offers a variety of opportunities to cover the digital and literacy gaps. Nonetheless, there is a lot of catching up especially with regard to the implementation of digital formats in educational content and the inclusion of people’s realities into didactic concepts. The project ABEDiLi – Adult Basic Education Digital Literacy is aiming to enhance the digital skills of the literacy educators. ABEDiLi aims at enabling teachers and trainers to combine and balance the usage of analogue and digital media in their teaching, giving them the tools to transfer digitalisation conceptually and didactically into their classrooms. The goal of this project is to empower adult basic educators, faced with seemingly endless array of choices offered by digitalisation processes, to identify useful options and concepts and to incorporate them into basic education and media education strategies. The two subject areas, basic skills and media literacy, will be linked to facilitate an innovative teaching design, which will enable adult educators to effectively implement digital media in their literacy classes. Media literacy as well as basic skills content is considered equal and complementary to teaching literacy and numeracy skills within the framework of the project. ABEDiLi strives to empower the adult educators starting from the digital newcomer all the way along to digital pioneers. By enabling teachers to utilise the possibilities offered through digitalisation processes, students will ultimately also benefit, as they will be able to increase their level of media literacy in a structured way. To achieve this, versatile European experience, perspectives, and materials will be collected in the form of e-Pool, compared and analysed in order to develop an international “Train the Trainer (TtT)” concept as well as “Digital Educational Escape Room (DEER)”.
e-Pool is the first step that implies gathering, analysing, bringing into system and categories of all the used digital tools and materials by partner organisations. Partners will share their experience on intensive use of digital tools before and during Corona times with all their dis/advantages. E-Pool is created in Google Education Apps and the final product will be offered as OER.
In the second step two IOs will be developed almost simultaneously on the basis of the e-Pool results. They are: a) “Digital Educational Escape Room (DEER)” is an innovative teaching method with the consecutive 2-day training for educators. The participants will be able not only experience the DEER but also learn how to develop the one for their class’ demands; b) “Train the Trainer” is the modular training concept in the form of blended learning where the adult basic trainers will be introduced into the notions and definitions of digital world, experience the digital tools themselves, work together on site and online in order to become successful multipliers. Course is aiming at facilitating the educator of the future with flexibility and methods knowledge while using digital tools in a rapidly changing and demanding world.
The final step is designated to summing up all the conducted activities in the form of the Handbook. All the experience during the testing phases with their ups and downs will be considered and put into the guide for trainers of ABEDiLi.
The ABEDiLi’s IOs will be developed in two dimensions: a) European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu) as well as partners’ practical experience. These will facilitate the creation of a concept that combines the best ideas from Europe and can be used without frontiers. b) the “Framework for 21st Century Learning,” i.e. using the four specific skills known as the “Four Cs”: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.