This eBook (PR3) aims to enable teachers to master the technical and pedagogical skills necessary for using the eco-technological pack in order to enrich their teaching and learning activities in classrooms and to develop their own technological activities with innovative, student-centered and constructivist pedagogical approaches and with a focus on preventing school failure and early school leaving. Needless to say, this is a paramount issue in general and an essential complementary result of our project.
The hardware and software presented in PR1 and PR2 were developed with the following main goal: putting pupils and students back at the centre of their learning process. If we used those tools just to follow teachers’ lead, replicating what he/she says, our mission would fail instantaneously. This implies that we need a solid pedagogic framework: 4-5 students with different skills are to work together to solve a challenge. The challenge was defined by implementing the project-based learning approach. We are basically talking about inductive vs. deductive; studentbased vs. teacher-based; personalised vs. collectivised; active vs. passive learning.
This eBook is based on specifically designed ecotechnology courses involving a minimum of 20 students at each school. The first course was developed from January 2023 until June 2023, based on the pedagogical approach described before. Just after this first course, we gathered preliminary data to allow us to effectively start writing our pedagogical guidelines. Then, a second eco-technology course allowed us to continue gathering more data from the experiences seen in the class and during that time we completed the guidelines upone completion of the second course.
In spring 2024 we gathered all the necessary data to create an integrated technological and pedagogical guide designed to optimise the use of the innovative technology we propose in this project. What we basically aimed at during both courses is not only teaching how to use specific hardware and software for environmental purposes, but also stimulating the social and soft skills that nowadays are so demanded by the labour market. More specifically, the objectives were: to provide a stepwise approach for a step by step acquisition of technical skills in using the given technology (hardware and software); to enable teachers to implement technology-based learning activities in their school; to practice and adopt the same pedagogy (constructivism/constructionism) that teachers are encouraged to implement in their school; to develop broader perspective projects and strategies and to provide multiple pathways for teachers to introduce eco-technology in schools to engage young people with environmental issues; to highlight that these type of students-centered activities play a significant role in catching students’ attention, especially those at risk of school failure or early school leaving; to provide methodology and tools for the overall evaluation of the guide as a training program for teachers.
The collected results are of inestimable value for two reasons: 1) providing the appropriate feedback for the hardware and software improvement; 2) testing the efficiency of the pedagogical framework and improve it along the courses. The document format is the interactive PDF released with a Creative Common licence and, considering the extraordinary dissemination effort and strategy we planned for this project, we expect it to have a considerable impact on our students, our teachers, our education centres, as well as many others at national and international level. Particularly, we aim to have an impact on the trans-disciplinary focus of current curricula, on the ICT role in the learning process and on the student-based teaching approach.
Below you will find the eBook interactive PDF in all the official project languages: English, Spanish, Romanian, Greek and Turkish.