Living in a world where education and the digital realm have merged, we are here to discuss the question: 'What makes a well-balanced transdigital education?"
There is no doubt that learning today requires both non-digital as well as digital learning.
For the past three years, the development of “Transdigital Education through Holistic Learning and Teaching” has been a priority for a group of students and teachers from Spain, Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Denmark. Therefore, together with the help of the Erasmus+ programme, they tried to understand the principle of transdigital education, and how to include it in students’ and teachers’ everyday lives.
Erasmus originally stood for "European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students." It was named after the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, who advocated the free movement of scholars across Europe during the Renaissance. Today, secondard school students are free to participate in Erasmus Plus as well.
Erasmus+ is the EU’s programme to support education, training, youth and sports in Europe.
Timeline of Our Erasmus+ Trips
Transdigital Education
The 4Cs
How do Erasmus projects help develop creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking?
Erasmus projects promote and strengthen the development of 21st century skills in many ways.
CREATIVITY
- Erasmus provides a multicultural environment so that all the participants interact with people who have different points of view, perspectives and cultural backgrounds. Sharing these we learn to be more open-minded and our creativity is stimulated as collaborating with people from other backgrounds gives rise to new ideas and thoughts.
- Many different creative activities were part of the Erasmus + modules, in which various forms of creativity were expressed and developed. These included not only making things, both digitally and manually, but also many forms of creative thinking.
COMMUNICATION
- Erasmus fosters communication in the sense that the participants will be gathering with people that speak different languages and practice different communication styles while working on a common goal. To do so we used a language, English, which is a second language for almost all participants. This difficulty required us to mobilize communicative awareness and adaptability. Especially the fact that we worked together to produce results forced us to be more reflective communicators than in native-language environments. We were more obliged than usually to think before speaking and to use communicative creativity to understand and be understood by others.
COLLABORATION
- Erasmus promotes collaboration between individuals with different backgrounds, disciplines, abilities and perspectives by sharing ideas to reach a common goal.
- Sharing multi-cultural perspectives helps participants acquire intercultural skills. These are crucial for productive collaboration both within the project and of course for future situations. Multi-perspective, collaborative approaches, we have learned, help to find efficient solutions to future problems.
- Skills such as respect, organization, responsibility, efficiency, and teamwork are part of successful collaboration.
- Erasmus helps us understand the need for good collaboration
CRITICAL THINKING
- The multiple perspective approach present in Erasmus projects turns us even more into critical thinkers.
- That is because the analysis, evaluation and decision-making process are enhanced by sharing different perspectives on project issues in the sense that we are compelled to include other perspectives when analyzing project questions. The process of questioning the reliability of information or what we consider to be our knowledge is enhanced because knowledge can be presented from different angles and we become aware of this in the process of working together. Interacting with different points of views and cultures in mind encourages people to think outside the box, improving their critical thinking skills.
Holistic Education
Digital Education
MOOC
An example of digital education is a MOOC.
During the week in Spain we worked on the importance of Transdigital Education. Students reflected on their Erasmus Weeks and showed us how important and inspiring this porgramme is.
After completing their MOOCs, students found both some benefits and drawbacks of digital education and the MOOCs themselves:
The SAMR Model
The SAMR model is a framework that supports educators in the integration of technology into their teaching practices in an effective way.
Students' experience with the 4 Cs
Collaboration
“First, I have deepened my knowledge of successful collaboration since the beginning of the project. I achieved this while travelling with classmates and teachers. Working together with like-minded people, I not only learned what strategies to apply when creating a journalistic text, but also how to successfully layout a magazine and apply creative solutions. So, the Erasmus week in Germany was productive and I gained knowledge that I will be able to apply further both in my studies and in my everyday life.” - Tadas
Communication
“Together with the theater teacher, we put on a play in two days. With the other groups, we discussed the books we had read and the projects we had done, and then we created a scenario to show off all of our work. And on April 21, we all played in a play we had created. It was really difficult to do everything in two days. Creating the script, the characters, dividing the roles and learning the words was possible because we worked with each other. This occasion taught me how important communication is between each other, not only among my team members but also with other students.” - Gabija
Creativity
“It was very interesting to work in a group with people from different schools because you get to know different cultures and different school systems and you end up developing original ideas and approaches that would have never come up in a traditional classroom.” - Paulina
Critical thinking
“In my module I had to do lots of work before going to the project itself. I had to think critically to successfully complete the tasks given.” - Danius
Authors:
- Atėnė Domeikaitė, šiauliai Didždvaris Gymnasium, 1st year of IB
- Bára Ann Vieweghová, Ikast-Brande Gymnasium, 1st year of IB
- Nerea Aira Monge, Voramon, 1st year of IB
- Sophie Bremer, Goetheschule Essen, Year 10