The pandemic crisis has reshaped the landscape of formal education worldwide.While the necessary shift to online and distance learning was made quickly, the majority of teachers were hardly prepared for it. Teachers had not only to be fluent in the use of ICT including online communication platforms and learning management systems, but also had to face a new school reality, that of the virtual classroom. Some of the main challenges that teachers had to face were: -to keep students motivated to actively engage in the virtual classroom, even in cases where the national authorities decreed that there would be no school exams at the end of the year. - to make sure that the learning outcomes of their lessons were achieved. -to adapt their educational practice accordingly following a more inclusive and personalized approach in order to address different types of learners. Adding to these, science teachers had to find creative ways to organize and implement laboratory work from a distance, utilizing in some cases simple materials to demonstrate experiments from their camera or browsing the web to find appropriate high quality digital tools and resources in order to support their practice. Last but not least, the desired goal of increasing students’ science motivation and fascination and attracting them to science careers, through the implementation of project based learning activities was put in a stalemate due to the Covid19 crisis. In order to answer to the challenges faced by the teachers and schools overall, the proposed project brings together actors in the field of scientific research, operators of large scientific infrastructures, education and outreach specialists and school education experts in order to enhance teachers’ digital preparedness and competences, to support high quality science teaching in situ and from a distance as well as support a long term organizational restructuring of schools. LaSciL envisions to empower and support teachers to become literate and fluent with the use of high quality digital tools; they will able to create their own open educational resources for use of their students in open and distance learning; they will able to manage large numbers of students in an online environment, keeping them motivated to participate, maintaining or enhancing their science motivation and personalizing their teaching practices based on the needs of their students. To achieve that, LaSciL will demonstrate innovative ways to involve teachers and students in eScience (O1) by sharing and exploiting the collective power of high quality digital resources (research facilities, scientific instruments, advanced ICT tools, simulation and visualisation applications and scientific databases; O2). It will provide teachers cutting edge, curriculum-tailored educational scenarios (O3) that can be used, reused and adapted to their needs as well as act as a source of inspiration for the design of their own open educational content. Throughout careful monitoring and assessment of the teacher training and implementation with students (O4), LaSciL aims to select a series of good practices and construct a roadmap (O5) both for supporting science teachers and a for proposing a new organizational framework for the collaboration between schools and research infrastructures which will demonstrate effective ways for involving a broader set of actors in the use of research infrastructures by developing a framework of actions that will attract young people to science and pool talent to scientific careers.

GEO-Academy aims to create a European network offering a comprehensive teacher training and development program which will provide pre- and in-service teachers opportunities for professional learning and development by using an efficient pedagogical approach aiming at holistically educating the next generation of European citizens on Sustainable Development topics. The consortium (12 partners from 7 EU countries) will establish a network and a community of practice to develop innovative strategies and learning modules for preparatory and continuous professional development for in-service and pre-service teachers on new innovative digital technologies upon competence-based educational pedagogies. The ultimate goal is to prepare the groundwork for a unified framework to foster teachers’ pedagogical, digital, green and spatial skills needed to succeed as incubator staff and at running an accelerator for successful Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programs in the respective countries and beyond.To utilize cutting edge geo-technologies, GEO-Academy aims to support the introduction of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS) and Earth Observation (EO) along with Geospatial Storytelling, through tools and materials freely accessible to all education institutions across Europe. The resources will be jointly developed by the consortium, designed to be easily attained, adopted and replicated, using state-of-the art educational approaches, methodologies and tools, with teachers acting as reflective professionals with roles both as trainees and co-designers. The material will be developed in English, German, Portuguese, Greek, Bulgarian and French. It will be the yeast of the GEO-Academy acting as hub for upskilling teachers’ pedagogical, green, digital and spatial skills to support students’ learning. During its lifecycle, GΕΟ-Academy will usher the activities through online, physical and blended training across Europe.

<< Background >>The EU Skills Panorama identified Renewable Energy Sources related skill needs in agriculture crucial. It underlines the need for improving skills on “using renewable energy”. Green jobs are growing at double rate in Agriculture than other sectors, but there is indeed a lack of technical, management and legal skills needed to upkeep and maintain RES plants on a daily basis. With green deal and bioeconomy we could expect raising demand of skilled people in this area.<< Objectives >>The partners identify RES-related skills needs and provide training to fill in this gap for both professional and unemployed people. They aimed at developing attractive, ECVET certified training programme in country language, that will allows upskill and reskill workers in the of operation and maintenance for the following RES plants in agriculture: biogas, biomass and solar. By the implementation of the project we provide improved level of skills for employability and new business creation.<< Implementation >>The training setup by agriculture RES experts, address farmers, advisors, and students. The training is completely modular and divided into five modules: 1) ICT, 2) biogas and biomethane, 3) solid biomass and 4) solar thermal and 5) solar photovoltaic. It was developed following the innovative “flipped classroom” methodology, mixing online training modules, in-class modules, and work-based learning periods, and available in 5 languages.<< Results >>The project design 5 platforms, with about 400 h of blended training (online, in-class) per language. The languages supported are Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. About 230 people followed the training and were fully satisfied with the training. The course is certified by Piedmont Region, in Italy and is listed in the VET catalogue course. The training material is free of use. Users can follow from only one day up to the whole course (50 days).

I-Media-Cities is the initiative of 9 European Film Libraries, 5 research institutions, 2 technological providers and a specialist of digital business models to share access to and valorise audiovisual (AV) content from their collections for research purposes in a wide range of social sciences (sociology, anthropology, urban planning, etc). The project revolves around cities in European history and identity. A huge quantity of fictional and non-fictional AV works (from the end of the 19th century onwards) in their collections describe cities in all aspects, including physical transformation and social dynamics. Such material could prove of enormous value to scholars in different fields of study. I-Media-Cities plans integration and technical development work to push interoperability among 9 archives and generate two types of e-environments to be used by researchers and innovators for research and other creative purposes. This will allow new approaches to research in social sciences and unleash creativity, in new forms of delivery and consumption of that content which the creative industry would be able to propose for instance in tourism or in the cultural economy. To make that possible, the project relies on collaboration among three main components: a) FHI (Film Holding Institutions); b) research institutions in different areas of social sciences; c) expertise in exploitation processes of digital content. At the end of the project, we will deliver a digital content access platform (interoperable and multilingual), made available to a growing community of researchers and creatives Europe-wide to push the boundaries of what we can learn, through AV material on cities, on European history and identity. The legacy of I-Media-Cities will be a new model for research on digital sources (applicable also to other subject areas), plus appropriate exploitation plans to consolidate and expand the platform into the European reference initiative on AV digital content.

"STEAM education is about engaging students in a multi- and interdisciplinary learning context that values the humanities and the artistic activities, while breaking down barriers that have traditionally existed between different classes and subjects. This trend reflects a shift in how school disciplines are being viewed. It is driven by a commitment to fostering everyday creativity in students, such that they engage in purposive, imaginative activity generating outcomes that are original and valuable for them. While this movement is being discussed almost explicitly in an education context, its roots are embedded across nearly every industry. A renewed interplay between art, science and technology exists. In many ways, technology is the connective tissue. DiSTARS aims to test a synchronised integration of Art and STEM in the primary curriculum, simulating the ways in which subjects naturally connect in the real world. Combining scientific inquiry with artistic expression (e.g. visual and performing arts), storytelling, and by using the STORIES storytelling platform along with AR and VR technology, the project aims to capture the imagination of young students and provide them with one of their early opportunities for digital creative expression. In spite of the strong gendering of interest in science, research has indicated that the “The possibility of life outside Earth” seems to be equally interesting for girls and boys. Students who will be involved in the project will work collaboratively in groups to express their visions for the future of Space Exploration. Each group of students will create a digital story in the form of an e-book (in a 2D or 3D environment) showing how they imagine a visit to any planet or moon in our solar sytem, the trip, the arrival, the buildings on the planet, the life of humans there. The project will focus at the age range 10 to 12 years old. It is the specific time that in most of the curricula in European Countries (and in the world) the Arts lessons of the curriculum are downgraded from other subjects, including STEM.More analytically the main objectives of DiSTARS are: a)to develop a pedagogical framework for integrating arts into STEM activities. Creativity will be supported and blended within project-based and inquiry science education approaches. The proposed framework will guide the teachers during the storytelling interventions towards better realizing their emerging role as coaches of learningb)to extensively use the STORIES advanced storytelling platform and its innovative VR & AR interfaces to support students in the creation of their digital stories. The STORIES platform was developed, tested and validated in 2019 within the framework an EU research and innovation (RIA) action. It allows for the creations of the students (paintings, models, dioramas and constructions, 3D objects and landscapes, animations, science videos and science theatre plays) to be captured according to their scenarios and be integrated in storylines. These students' storylines presented on various interfaces (3D Worlds, VR and AR) will be available in the form of interactive ebooks. The platform will be upgraded to inlude besides Mars, the Moon and other planets of our Solar system.c)to create a series of STEAM hands-on activities that expand students' knowledge on space exploration and to propose innovative teaching strategies that will offer students high participation, will support deeper learning and will formulate a common set of guidelines on how scientific work can be used to explore “real science” with “story telling as a catalyst""d)to pilot DiSARS to real settings in Germany, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria and Portugal. e)to provide assessment tools that go beyond addressing students’ intellectual ability looking into competences such as collaborative problem-solving, communication etc. that become indicators of deeper learningf) to promote the project results and communicate the impact and benefits to the different identified target groupsResearch in education indicates that a shift is taking place in schools all over the world as learners are exploring subject matter through the act of creation rather than the consumption of content. Honing these skills in learners can lead to deeply engaging learning experiences in which students become the authorities on subjects through investigation, storytelling, and production. DiSTARS as a promoter of this transformation stretches the importance of piloting and evaluating its approach in real settings across Europe. The main DiSTARS target groups are school communities (including parents), researchers in STEM education and in ICT-based education and ebook developers and publishers. Following the implementation of the project's activities, the dissemination targets will include educational policy makers as well as curriculum developers."