2nd Project Meeting

Short-term joint staff training in Vienna

The Short-term joint staff training, part of BLEND-IT, Erasmus+ project was held in Wien, from 12 to 16 January 2015. This event brought together representative participants from all partner institutions involved in this strategic partnership.

The Short-term joint staff training, took place over five days, with most of the Days consisting on working sessions and Day Three taking the form of working sessions combined with team building activities.

The working sessions included the official opening and closing of the meeting, learning sessions and roundtables focusing on discussing all priorities and agendas, such as development of the intellectual output of the project and the best approach to it.

1st Day

The official opening of the Short-term joint staff training, Erasmus+ project was held in one of the computer’s room at Höhere graphische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt: Mr. Georg Blaha, Austrian coordinator and director Gustav Linnert welcomed all partners. After, everyone introduced themselves and formally initiated the materialization of the course.

Following that, the main items in the 1st day agenda were covered.

Mr. Georg Blaha presented the training, including aspects related to the objectives, activities, responsibilities and other such. He gave a brief introduction concerning the software needed to be installed, and all partners had some time to install all these applications on their personal computers so that the training will run smoothly after that.

2nd Day

The second day started early in the morning with a short presentation of the 4 modules of the course.

After that we have started with the 1st module “Turning the traditional classroom into its head”.

We have started with the etivity 1: “I as a teacher”, which required us to reflect on our role in the teaching process, on the objectives we have etc. After each participant added its views we had the opportunity to compare and exchange opinions.

Each participant has started to create a lesson plan for one unit, integrating this video or screen cast.

The lesson plan created will be used in Italy, during the students’ exchange.

3rd Day

The third day started with some hands on workshops. We have learnt how to create our own animations, videos and how to insert these in our Moodle courses.

We have also practised presenting our videos and activities in front of the other participants and we have exchanged comments about these, aiming at improving our work.

The next activity focused on the role of the online tutor, its tasks and responsibilities, as well as learning how to deal with possible issues like: lurkers, lack of activity, bad comments etc.

Following this, discussion moved on to 5 the stages of e-moderating: access motivation, online socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction and development.

4th Day

The forth day consisted in workshops devoted to the methodology of e-learning. We have added more content to our test courses. We have practiced being a student and a course creator on our Moodle platform.

The next topic, during this day was to learn how to efficiently evaluate, how to grade assignments, how to track completion of the course and how to get students’ feedback.

At the end of this day we have all learned how to set up a Moodle course adapted for our classroom, how to add course materials ( like presentations, videos and web links), how to get our learners enrolled, and how to foster collaborative learning with forums and chats. We also learned how to include quizzes, polls and other resources.

The day ended with some team building activities.

5th Day

The last day of this training focused on evaluating the skills and competencies developed by participating representatives of each partner institution. The evaluation consisted on the completition of 100% of the course tasks to a satisfactory standard.

We have all added all the materials created to our test course. Later, we were asked to present shortly our course and we had the opportunity to reflect on its creation and design.

The meetings ended after some details of the future students exchange were discussed. Each accompanying teacher will have to teach at least one lesson using Blended Learning to a class formed by the visiting students and their Italian peers.

All participants at this training received a certificate of attendance and a Europass Mobility certificate.