Due to the Covid pandemic, Joint Staff Training Event was held in Zadar as a blended activity, where some partners were present in person and others joined online thorough Google meet. Although all partners couldn’t meet in city of Zadar in Croatia, online platform gave us an opportunity to invite teachers, educators, students and librarians to join five-day training event.
Training was held for five days from 22.03. till 26.03. and considering that training was held during the working week and with participants from 4 partners countries (Latvia, Spain, Croatia and Greece), agenda was divided in morning and afternoon sessions.
Altogether there was around 70 participants who actively participated in the training.
Training materials were conceived in following way:
- Presentation of the project and wat has been achieved so far and what to expect in next following months
- Theoretical background of methodology and educational approaches used in the project
- Interactive workshops with partners and participants where they experienced methodology through practical work
In each session there was guided discussion with participants that enabled a constant share of additional ideas on how to work with traditional children’s stories and value education. Participants shared their experience in formal and non-formal education, difficulties and challenges when engaging in value education, comments on workshops and how to adjust them for certain group age or how to extend a workshop with additional activities.
Participants also shared examples of good practice from their countries that could be easily adopted to other partners countries.
In addition to the training event, the participants were invited, via online, to join the students from Primary school Joip Pupačić (Croatia) in one of the workshops from TRACE project.
Students were from six grade and workshop was led by their teacher Marija Šarac on English language. While in the other interactive workshops the participants were directly engaged in activities through various set of methodologies, this time they could observe practical use of traditional children’s stories with students in the classroom.
Last day of the training was reserved for open dialog and guided discussion with participants on what they experienced during the training.
Participants were also given an online evaluation form through which they described their experience of the training.
Some comments from the five-day training event:
What did you like/enjoy most about the online event?
Our conversation was relaxed and educational.
The feeling of belonging to a community of teachers.
I enjoyed the liveliness and interest of the children.
Positive and creative atmosphere.
I have gained knowledge that will be useful for my work.
We had the opportunity to learn new and interesting subjects.
It was a very interesting experience, through which I really enjoyed meeting new people. The subject of the meetings was also fascinating and colorful as well as enlightening in many aspects.
The exchange of the experiences, which was most fruitful.
Sharing ideas, new approaches to traditional stories.
Collaboration and new ideas. Also, that I will be able to apply what I learnt in my work.
The collaboration and the interactivity among people from different countries. The multicultural brainstorming can be highly useful!
Collaboration and share of ideas for the improvement of the teaching process.
I enjoyed most of all the chance to meet with fellow teachers and students from around the Europe. It was a pleasure to gain ideas for my own teaching style.
There was many examples and practices on the methodology that helped me understand and interact.