DLS6Erasmus+Projects-ACT

In accordance with the framework for ET 2020 and Paris Declaration 2015 schools should recognize the need to develop their students’ critical thinking skills and digital literacy required to handle information and create new resources so that they become informed citizens able to fully participate in all aspects of society after graduation and equally recognize, analyse and reject any form of discrimination. Consequently, schools need to adjust their instruction to the students’ interests and to the constant digital changes.

In their endeavour to keep up with the rapid technological changes mirrored in the nowadays society, schools are concerned about the amount of unselected information students are exposed to, but mainly overwhelmed by the impact media and digital media have upon students. By developing students’ digital skills in a creative way, learning becomes meaningful and might be easily related to their future, helping to perceive the benefits of education towards goal-directedness and self-confidence.

Act-Activate Critical Thinking-from media literacy to digital literacy against discrimination 2019-1-RO01-KA229-063699_1, Erasmus+ project represents a real opportunity for schools to try to find an easy to implement the method, a chance to demonstrate that a strong cross-curricular approach will allow students to work collaboratively in flexible grouping, and to become critical media and digital literates, confident that the knowledge, skills and beliefs acquired are useful in their postgraduate life.

As a follow-up to Europe’s Digital Agenda and of ET2020, the project‘s scope is to ensure media and digital literacy through critical thinking to high school students, aged 14-19, in four European schools from Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal and Malta, for a period of 2 years. The project meets the need schools to develop their students’ critical thinking skills and digital literacy required to handle information and create new resources so that they become informed citizens able to fully participate in all aspects of society after graduation and equally recognize, analyse and reject any form of discrimination.

1. To offer teachers cross-curricular opportunities to exchange views, share methods and create useful teaching materials, incorporating ICT and allow them to become creators of a critical thinking framework to be applied into daily teaching, by designing 1 teaching guide;


2. To train 4 core teams of students to understand how digital and social media influence our lives, by identifying and sharing similarities & differences in the practices of different countries, using inquiry-based learning and critical thinking for 2 years;


3. To develop cross-curricular civic and intercultural competences enhancing the learning responsibility of the students’ use of critical thinking regarding media information encountered, enabling them to discriminate between fake news and the authentic ones, between discriminatory messages, in order to reject manipulation, combining at least 3 school subjects;


4. To develop digital skills in creating media-related content.

The methodology of the project uses blended activities for teachers and students in relation with real-life issues: internet exploratory ones, a mixture of creative and real-world activities, surveys and workshops, eTwinning courses, teaching material creation, etc.

Without being exhaustive in reaching the objectives the projects include:

• Critical Thinking and Media Literacy for teachers (Short-term joint staff training events);
• ICT and Digital Media for teachers (Short-term joint staff training events);
• Critical Thinking and Media Literacy for students (Short-term exchanges of groups of pupils)
• ICT and Digital Media for students (Short-term exchanges of groups of pupils)
• Creation of a teaching guide and a set of flashcards;
• Local activities: logo competition, workshops, presentations, study visits, dissemination activities, etc.

The first target group is formed of 14-19-year-old high school students from 4 European countries who will be participants in both the local and international activities. The second target group is formed of teachers of different school subjects who are interested in media and digital literacy but mostly in acquiring good practice of critical thinking applications in their daily teaching.

• 1 survey in the 4 schools;
• 1 e-magazine for students( digital literacy and art);
• 1 teaching guide including concrete critical thinking materials applied to media and digital literacy;
• 1 set of flashcards to be used into teaching,
• 1 webpage for the project;
• 4 workshops locally organised, etc.;
• Intercultural skills, critical thinking skills, digital skills, collaboration and teamwork developed.

The training activity focussed on the integration of critical thinking and media literacy into the classroom. Theoretical aspects, as well as opportunities and limitations, were dealt with. Interactive learner-centred pedagogy and inquiry-based pedagogical model was used along with the activity through debates, workshops and practical demonstrations.

The participants were acquainted with the general presentation of critical thinking, the stages of critical thinking development, the elements of thought and the presentation of the Socratic Method and the criteria for evaluating reasoning. Debates on how to apply critical thinking in the current teaching and learning activity were organized together with workshops on critical thinking and media/digital literacy, engaging practical demonstration of integrating media/digital literacy into the current teaching, students and teachers taking part in. Additionally, presentations on how to create lesson plans incorporating Critical thinking and the limitations of teaching Critical thinking and Media literacy skills to students were also given. Commonly, the participant teachers outlined the framework and format of the teaching guide on critical thinking skills and media/digital media literacy as well as those of the flashcards to be used as teaching material and integrated into the current teaching.

The training activities were directly related to and integrated into the foreign language teaching practices of the school as well as to practical activities because, during the activities, teachers had the opportunity to see examples and concrete methods applied in the context of class teaching high school students aged 14-19. At the end of the activity, a feedback component was provided by the participants.

12 students and 3 teachers from De La Salle College Sixth Form participated in the C2 activity as part of the Erasmus Plus Project which took place in Madeira. The student exchange involved students and teachers from Bulgaria, Romania, and our hosts from Calheta in Madeira.

The five-day course took place from the 28th of March to the 1st of April. The course itself involved practical sessions held in the host school, Escola Básica e Secundária da Calheta. This training activity gave participating teachers new ICT and digital skills, learning how to work more successfully on TwinSpace, Social and digital media in education. The training event was structured into training workshops.

1. Teachers were shown new, innovative teaching methods from non-formal education and teaching techniques such as: Flipped Classroom (Inverting your class), Social Media, Visual and Media literacy.
2. ICT for collaboration - The aim of the module was to provide participants practical examples of how to use ICT in class and apply the acquired skills to exploit and create ICT resources for teaching and learning. Participants learned how to work with free educational tools as well as easy-access software to develop basic techniques such as image and sound editing, digital storytelling creation etc by using a wide range of tools such as Doodle, Padlet, Scribble Map, Pixton, PowToon and Stop Motion for movie making, Web 2.0 tools to create crosswords, poll and quizzes - PollEveryWhere, Mentimeter, Kahoot!, Social Networking.
3. eTwinning, new TwinSpace and Adobe Connect. The participants were presented with different tools available on new TwinSpace, how to collaborate, how to create a webpage, to use a blog, to upload materials, how to start and attend online events on Adobe Connect. They also practised educational games and methods from non-formal education.

The group visited the island’s capital, Funchal, birthplace of football star Ronaldo. This one-day trip to Funchal included a visit to Jornal da Madeira, a newspaper publisher in Madeira, during which the editorial staff explained the importance of establishing facts from reliable sources in their journalistic endeavours.

The students participated in a guided tour of Mudas, a Contemporary Art Museum in Calheta, that involved a hands-on bag painting session. They also visited the Câmara Municipal da Calheta and a Sugar Cane Mill Factory in Calheta.

Program of Training

28th of September 2021 Tuesday

09:00 Breakfast

10:00 Presentation: ICT skills and work on eTwinning platform. (Tsvetanka)

11:00 Workshop: ICT skills and work on eTwinning platform. (teachers)

12:00 Create educational materials for the tool kit-lesson planning (Olivia)

13:00 Lunch

14:00 Getting to know each other games.

14:30 Outdoor activities - Scavenger hunt games and ICT tools to create digital materials for them.

16:00 Reflection of the day

20:00 Dinner

29th of September 2021 Wednesday

09:00 Breakfast

10:00 Presentation: Some exercises/games used from non-formal education to formal education and how to organize it online (Tsvetanka)

10:30 Workshop: How to create web page on TwinSpace, how to use the Forum and the Twin Board (Tsvetanka)

13:00 Lunch

14:00 - Introduction to Flipped Classroom and Visual and Media literacy (Tsvetanka)

15:00 Outdoor classroom. How we can use ICT tools for creating activities with CT (critical thinking) (outdoor workshop at Baba Vida fortres)

17:00 reflection of the day

20:00 Dinner at the restaurant Bononia

30th of September 2021 Thursday

09:00 Breakfast

10:00 - Introduction to Web 2.0 tools to create crosswords, poll and quizzes – PollEveryWhere, Mentimeter, Kahoot!, Social Networking,

12:00 Create educational materials for the tool kit-lesson planning. Exercises/games used from non-formal education to formal education and how to organize it online, (teachers)

13:00 Lunch

14:00 Monitoring and evaluation

15:00 Awarding certificates of attendance. Closure.

16:00 optional trip to Belogradchik rocks.

19:00 Dinner

The 5 days learning activities for students was held in Malta between the 23rd and 27th May 2022 with the purpose of allowing students, who have previously been acquainted with critical thinking and media literacy, to associate various ICT tools to critical thinking skills and digital media in order to develop citizenship values.

Apart from theoretical presentations three main practical workshops were held:

1. Learning with the Net Generation. Various icebreakers using a mixture of formal and non-formal methods were used to reactivate previous knowledge related to the topic of the project.
2. Digital media and ICT. Students were presented with various ICT tools: desktop and online applications, such as Pixton, with the purpose of creating an e-magazine.
3. Social Interactivity using digital media. Students debated and explored ways of using digital media for specific cases. They learned to select information, to combine, access, modify, store digital images, digital video, video games and social media in an educated way.

Students also had the opportunity to visit Fort St Angelo in Birgu and Valletta the capital of Malta.