Kids in Clouds Erasmus+ project partners’ focus is on empowering teachers and students for embracing cloud-computing in teaching on a daily basis. After preparing educational materials for teachers and testing them during the pilot phase, we designed 52 interdisciplinary projects. All of these are now ready for implementation in schools across Europe. These projects represent digital educational materials for children. In the last phase of the project, partners were dedicated to testing these materials with teachers and students.
Kids in Clouds 52 digital educational materials for children are ready-to-use projects that encompass teaching scenarios and all needed learning materials for students. Since all materials are easy to use for both teachers and students, it is only necessary to do the first step – choose the topic and learning with the help of cloud-tools can start.
This is exactly what was done in Kids in Clouds partner schools – teachers and students from Ludina Primary School (Velika Ludina, Croatia), College Jules Reydellet (Saint-Denis, France), Secondary School St. St. Cyril and Methodius (Smolyan, Bulgaria) and Primary School Horvati (Zagreb, Croatia) have tested created materials as part of the pilot process. This way, 11 teachers and 186 students from Bulgaria, Croatia and France have integrated created educational materials into their learning environments and tested them.
This was an opportunity for students to acquire different knowledge and skills working on interdisciplinary topics, relying on project-based learning and using many cloud based tools. Moreover, teachers and students assessed the success-rate of the educational materials and practicality of the online repository.
The questionnaire that pilot participants filled in before and after running the pilot showed that majority of the teachers (64 %) finds educational materials very practical and well structured. Additionally, majority of teachers (82 %) who tested educational materials with their students, pointed out that tested educational materials enable students to acquire relevant knowledge and skills. Finally, the most important fact in terms of project impact is that 91 % of the teachers pointed out that testing the materials with students encouraged them to introduce new methods of teaching and working with students from now on which means they will encourage students to use digital tools during classes very often in the future.
When it comes to students’ opinion, questionnaire results showed that level of students’ motivation for learning was higher than usually (when they do not work on interdisciplinary projects using cloud tools). Additionally, students cooperated in teams very well and managed to use new cloud tools very fast.
Detailed results of the pilot process together with guidelines on pedagogical strategy for teachers are available here.
Since teachers and students recognized benefits of cloud-computing in teaching during the pilot process, it can be concluded that project partners achieved their goals.
Many thanks to all project partners!
#KidsinClouds #Erasmus+
