Welcome to The PreEdTech project

About the project

Background

Since the beginning of the pandemic, teachers everywhere struggled to maintain the relevance of their classes in the current context, as well as maintain the interest of their pupils. While teachers of primary, secondary and high school found a functional approach relatively soon, pre-primary teachers were constrained by the lack of online resources available, clear explanations on procedures and by their pupils’ age-related communication and interaction issues – resulting in a constant cry for the parents’ help.

At Scoala Primara EuroEd, there was an early development effort aimed at transferring teaching materials and practices in the online environment and preparing the actors involved in the teaching-learning effort for a different procedure and set of tools. In this respect, teachers benefitted from technical explanatory materials and pedagogical training activities, parents were helped understand the teaching process and their potential implication in it, and children were provided with a high quality set of materials and activities, designed and delivered via digital means. The end result was positive and very positive feedback from parents and from children in what concerns the digital teaching quality.

Educational institutions responded to the COVID19 pandemic in different ways, with the range of responses and options available to students, parents, and teachers that were partly dependent on the resources available in a community and on teachers’ training/experience. As a consequence, there are widening gaps in accessing the quality of education available to students around the world. Keeping in mind that digital learning is a new concept in the teaching process and that the teachers’ previous experience is almost non-existent in the field, or the fact that the dynamic of the lesson is different in the digital learning, we have to adapt the structure, the content, and the cursivity of the lessons.

From a study published by Sociologie Românească, 2020, vol. 18, which synthesizes the challenges faced by teachers in the period of online learning, emerged: “The most challenging part of the online education was adapting the traditional content to the online delivery. Even if most of them were already “friends” with technology, they did not know how to teach online. The teacher’s role is no longer only to deliver information, it has to be more than that; it must facilitate education: “Our role, as teachers, is to engage our students in learning,” said one of the teachers.
Teachers used different platforms according to the subject they were teaching and the characteristics of the target group. Preparing the online lessons took more time than preparing for the traditional face-to-face lessons, and it required a lot of work, creativity, and motivation”.

In this context the project’s consortium consists of four kindergartens, two from Romania – EuroEd and Sfantul Sava, one from Lithuania- Sviesa and one from Turkey- Anafartalar, three non-profit associations with focus on education Lithuania- EMundus, Spain-XANO, Italy- Pixel and one private tech company Italy- Connectis. All the above-mentioned institutions have kindergartens as associated partners, which are the sites of student’s practical training; they function in big clusters together with other educational institutions, social partners, non-profit or profit organizations of informal education.
We can safely say that 4 of the 8 partners directly faced the challenges that distance learning produced: the absence of digital skills of kindergarten teachers, the digital resources unadapted / unsuitable for preschool age, outdated available technology, and the unsuitable pedagogical doctrines to the context of online learning. Of course, the other four partners of the project indirectly faced the same challenges.

Objectives

The PreEdTech project is inspired by this successful effort. Its main aim is to provide pre-primary teachers and educators with the means of adapting their activities to the online environment, the rationale behind targeting teachers of this level being that they are at a disadvantage when compared to teachers of different levels in what concerns availability of materials, tools, guides and general resources in the online environment.

The other direction of the project concerns the parents and their implication in the teaching-learning process, which, in the current context, are oftentimes more than just simple spectators to an online class; parents are pivotal in reaching, communicating with and involving pre-school children in activities. In this context, the PreEdTech Project objectives focus on:

- strengthening the professional profile of preschool teachers by developing an innovative guide on remote learning, by PR1, in the first year of the project

- Increasing the competences of kindergarten teachers on Digital Education Readiness in the field of School Education, through the training sessions for 150 teachers, by PR2, in the second year of the project

- Increasing access to quality education for kindergarten children by providing adapted educational resources, by PR3, in the second year of the project.