On Thursday 6 June, the final conference of the Erasmus+ project EMPOWER took place at EfVET premises.
The EMPOWER: Empowering Digital Citizenship Through Media Literacy and Critical Thinking final conference has gathered around 30 people from different stakeholders and target audience based in Brussels and abroad.
The event was launched by Åsa Kajsdotter, (Folkuniversitetet Stiftelsen Vid Lunds Universitet, Sweden) project coordinator. She introduced the three main project outputs: Good Practice Catalogue for Media Literacy and Critical Thinking in VET, the Digital Citizenship education toolkit and the Teacher’s Guide to Digital Pedagogy, which are available at EMPOWER website.
Gorka Gonzalez, CEBANC and Catherine Neil, Canice Consulting Limited introduced the practical side of the project. Gorka Gonzalez, (Administration teacher at CEBANC) explained how went the pilot testing of the main resources, and how the students get to adequately understand how their media presence can have an impact on daily life, and how to become good digital citizenship is about the online and offline world. Catherine Neil showed the participants how to use the main learning resources:
- Digital citizenship toolkit: which includes a series of PowerPoints which can be downloaded for free.
- Digital tools showcase: is designed to help you learn some of the top digital tools in under 1 hour, classify in 10 categories
- Digital pedagogy course: 5 Learning modules targeting teachers and trainers.
The panel of experts counted with the Sabrina Vorbau (European Schoolnet) and Alexandra Kozyra (EAEA).
Sabrina Vorbau, specialized in online safe for youngest, explained how the digital world is affected the online safety among kids but also how important is to train parents and teachers to be aware of the new trends. Vorbau and the Digital Citizenship team are involved in different projects and initiatives, such as the Safer Internet Day, Insafe or the SELMA project which are raising awareness about the potential risk of the online world and providing tools to prevent them.
Alexandra Kozyra introduced the project Life skills for Europe which aims to improve basic skills provision in Europe including capabilities for life and work. Surprisingly, a high percentage of adult today are lacking basic skills.
All in all, EMPOWER event was the perfect opening not only to introduce the last resources of the project but also to reflect on our own presence on the online world and the skills that we need to be aware of them.
