EuNIC Report 3 - Supporting the EuNIC Teachers

The main aim of the EuNIC project is to promote throughout Europe a "concept-oriented" approach to digital literacy, as opposed to a technology oriented one. According to the project, this can be achieved by adapting and transferring to other European countries an innovative approach to digital literacy (called NIC) developed in 2001 in Italy by ITD-CNR, which has been widely experimented by the Centro Atene with very positive results. Up to now during the project a state of the art has been developed (Report 1) whose aim was to understand deeply the situation in each partner's country as far as digital literacy is concerned and set the bases to identify suitable target populations for experimenting the EuNIC approach. Based on the results of Report 1 and the Italian experience (NIC), the European approach to digital literacy has also been designed (Report 2). According to the proposal, this approach will be tried out in each partner country through the delivery of pilot courses managed by pioneer teachers who will become the experts in their country for the EuNIC approach. Thus the EuNIC teachers will play a key role in the process of methodological transfer because they will be in charge of running the EuNIC courses, possibly tuning the approach according to the context and collecting the data needed to evaluate the experiment. In case of success, they might be in charge of disseminating the approach in their country by training more teachers to run the courses. In other words, they will be in the position promoting the approach at national level. For these reasons, it is essential that they acquire a deep understanding of the methodology and of the related learning materials. To this end, according to the EuNIC plans, they will be provided with formal and informal training opprtunities before, during and after the running of the pilot courses. In particular: -an online training course for the EuNIC teachers was designed and run in order to provide them with an a priori understanding of the approach and to start up the embryo of an EuNIC teachers community; -a "Follow up" area has been set up in order to support the teachers during the run of the pilot courses and maintain the community; -a virtual European platform has been set up, so that teachers can share their know-how as far as the application of the approach is concerned, and they can exchange opinions and information during and after the run of the pilot courses; -a final seminar will gather the project partners and the teachers, so that they will be able to devise and discuss the EuNIC transferability strategy, find ways to further disseminate the project results and explore possible ways the to maintain the EuNIC community after the end of the project. Inthis document, a detailed description is provided of the above mentioned actions undertaken within the project for supporting the creation of communities of EuNIC teachers.