Digital Destiny

DDESTINY aims at supporting primary school teachers of children 6-10-year old (1-4 grade) in four European countries to master the challenges caused by the COVID19 pandemic and global sustainability challenges defined in the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, by advancing teachers’ competences in digital literacy and educational design so that they can offer effective blended learning experiences in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), using thinking-based education and storytelling as pedagogical instruments.
Through online competence-building activities for teachers, creation of innovative learning content on sustainable development fit for blended learning, and an online platform with pedagogical resources and exercises, DDESTINY will support teachers and schools to create blended-learning opportunities to foster the key competencies for sustainability of students aged 6 to 10. DDESTINY is very aware of the importance of a strong alliance between teachers and parents in the education of children, and therefore includes coherent guidelines for parents to support the development of key competencies for sustainability of their children. Special attention goes to the obstacles disadvantaged students encounter while confronted with a digital learning environment. Therefore DDESTINY consciously chooses blended learning and offers special visual thinking tools to visualize the thinking processes of students in an intuitive and communicative way. Since reflection and (self)assessment are essential to all learning-processes DDESTINY designs the appropriate tools for both teachers and students to do so.
All this will be gathered in an ESD blended-Learning lesson design-approach which will be offered on an online learning platform for teachers.
In order to ensure that our educational approach and learning materials for ESD teaching and learning will be based on solid foundation DDESTINY will use the first 6 months of the project to do an in-depth analysis of context in which we are creating this materials. This analysis will accumulate empirical data that will 1) further support and concretize the scope of the DDESTINY project and 2) support the partnership in creating a highly relevant learning approach and materials that ensures access of all students to quality learning during times of crisis like COVID19 and facilitates parental engagement in learning activities, and 3) provide us with scientific documentation that will contribute to the existing literature on ESD and the competence gaps that DDESTINY addresses.