Who are we?
This Erasmus+ project is a collaboration between 5 different organisations.
Get to know us!
Belgium - Brussels
Becentral / Mediawijs Kantersteen 10 1000 Brussel
Website: www.mediawijs.be
Email: info@mediawijs.be
Email: yana.baetens@mediawijs.be
Email: jeroen.herman@mediwijs.be
Yana Baetens
Yana started her career as a high school teacher. Driven by the passion for teaching, she wanted to know more on how children and youngsters proces information and started a Master in pedagogical sciences. That's how she ended up at Mediawijs where she is responsible for the development of learning materials and tools. She is also involved in the teacher training program for media literacy where she helps developing the curriculum and the MOOC. She also has experience with using games in the classroom, how to bring news into the classroom and blended learning.
Jeroen Herman
Jeroen has both a teachers degree in primary school and masters degree in pedagogy. During his intership for the masters, he started at Mediawijs and worked on lesson plans for media literacy in primary education. Resulting from that, he started working at Mediawijs where he's responsable for combining his pedagogical expertise with his big interest for media literacy. He's currently involved with the development of a MOOC about disinformation and helps with the teacher training program for media literacy in Flanders. He also developed a policy tool for schools in Flanders to create or strenghten their own policy about media literacy and specific topics, e.g. sexting, cyberbullying, copywriting, online identity.
Hi there!
We are Mediawijs, Flemish Knowledge Centre for Digital and Media Literacy since 2013 and we support citizens to be(come) media literate!
That's a mouth full, so let's dig a little deeper:
Flemish:northern half of Belgium, government funded
Knowledge Centre: research and best practice based supporting the field in reaching the public
Digital and Media Literacy: two sides of the same coin!
Media literacy is the whole of knowledge, skills and attitudes that allows citizens to deal with the complex, changing and mediatised world in a conscious and critical way. It is the ability to use media in an active and creative way, aimed at societal participation.
As a knowledge center, Mediawijs is active at the crossroads of policy, research and practice. An ever-growing network of researchers, policy makers, teachers and media professionals (including journalists, game developers, etc.) is at the basis of the products and services offered by Mediawijs: conferences, teaching packages, campaigns, workshops, MOOC’s ... to make grumbling young people, parents, vulnerable adults and professionals active, creative, critical and aware media users.
Mediawijs coordinates and organises several large scale projects for Flemish education, such as News in the Classroom (in which classes receive access to newspapers and news magazines with accompanying educational material) and De Schaal van M, a contest in cooperation with the Flemish public broadcaster’s children’s channel in which 10-12 year olds work intensely on digital and media literacy. Mediawijs has built up a large expertise in online polarisation and disinformation. As a partner in the Belgian Safer Internet Centre, Mediawijs works on awareness tools and campaigns on online risks in the framework of secondary sexting, cyberbullying and digital balance. With MediaNest.be, Mediawijs informs parents on digital and media parenting.
With this expertise Mediawijs has co-created tools for education such as the EduBox Fake News, the EDUbox Social media, the Mediacoach MOOC or the international Migrant Liter@cies MOOC.
Therefore, working on a blended learning approach to involve teachers and parents in learning about ESD is something we look forward to!
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Iceland - Reykjavik
Office address: Skeifan 19 (3rd floor), 108 Reykjavik, Iceland Website: www.northconsulting.is Tel: + 354 8204752 Email: info@northconsulting.is
Email: maria@northconsulting.is
Email: andrea@northconsulting.is
We are a small team of education and innovation enthusiasts who love contributing to making learning fun and accessible for all and ensuring that creativity and curiosity is fostered from an early age and nurtured throughout life.
The DDestiny Team from NORTH consists of:
Maria Kristin Gylfadottir
Maria is the General Manager of NORTH.
She has for the past 20 years worked within the research, innovation and educational sectors with positions at Reykjavik University (2000-2003), The Research Liaison Office of the University of Iceland (2003-2009), The European Commission in Brussels (2009-2013, The Icelandic Center for Research, where she managed the Erasmus+ National Agency (RANNIS) (2013-2018) and now NORTH Consulting ehf.
Maria was a vice counsillor in the Municipality of Hafnarfjordur (2006-2010) and served on municipal committees on climate and environment, family affairs and education. She was also the President of the National Parent Association in Iceland (2004-2008). Maria is an expert in entrepreneurship education, qualifications systems and skills development, participatory learning and harvesting, curricula development strategy planning, project management, team building.
Andrea Cheatham Kasper
Andrea recently returned to Iceland with her family after spending the last eight years in the USA. Andrea has an EdD in Educational Leadership and her dissertation focused on the construct of entrepreneurial orientation as it applies to education. She has been teaching and working in education for over 25 years, most recently as Head of School & CEO of an independent school in Connecticut. She has lived in a total of five countries and has a breadth of experience as an immigrant, a language learner, dancer and teacher in different cultural contexts. Her passion for education stems from her desire to change common and traditional teaching practices and assure that new methods engage students, keep them active, help them take charge of their own learning and are supported by educational research. In addition, she is committed to developing educators and leaders as authentic, compassionate and thoughtful actors in their classrooms, schools and communities. Andrea is very excited to join North Consulting.
NORTH Consulting was founded in 2009 as an education and innovation consultancy and a training company for the cultural, innovation and educational sectors. NORTH supports organizations in realizing their potential, creating policies, developing training programmes, curricula and learning materials. We work with different entities involved in educational, cultural, entrepreneurial and research activities in different sectors. Our focus areas for the last few years have been on education for sustainable development (ESD), entrepreneurship, democratic citizenship and youth participation in decision-making. We also work with municipalities in creating and implementing education policies, planning and implementing training activities and support to teachers, particularly on ESD, global citizenship, inclusion and entrepreneurship. We have also worked on several skills formation and competence building activities and contribute regularly to international surveys on different educational topis. Our involvement in different projects and activities has allowed us to build up a strong network of people active in the education, culture and innovation sectors, both in Iceland and across Europe.
NORTH manages the Digital destiny project and co-wrote the concept behind the project and the Erasmus+ application in tight collaboration with other partners. Our desire to create this partnership stems from three reasons:
1. Our love for creating new learning approaches and tools for learning
2. Our love for and expertise in creative thinking methods and innovation learning
3. Our love for the environment and the future of our societies and the importance of integrating sustainability issues into the didactics of learning.
The partnership behind Ddestiny is also composed of people who share the same love for education and innovation as we do at NORTH and who are experts in their respective fields.
Belgium - Leuven
Djapo vzw Ortolanenstraat 6 3010 Kessel-lo Tel: 0460/95.71.01 Email: info@djapo.be
An Yskout
An started out as a secondary school teacher, but after a few years she decided to dive into the social-profit sector. There she specialized, among other things, in non-formal education, team development and process management. Her great love for sustainability, bridge-building and process guidance eventually led her to Djapo.
At Djapo, An helps the team of facilitators – who assist teachers in change processes or trainings – to embed process guidance in their daily work. She also helps to translate the theoretical framework of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into the daily Djapo operation.
An sees many possibilities in Digital Destiny and above all hopes that teachers all over Europe will enthusiastically experiment with our tools for blended learning and ESD.
Sabine Anné
Sabine has been fascinated by ecology for years. While studying primary education, she also became fascinated with thinking education, and a match was made. She got the bug to develop teaching materials and educational concepts, preferably around sustainability themes. As an educational developer at Djapo she can fully indulge in both education and sustainability. She specializes mainly in didactics for ESD in primary education. Sabine developed a method ‘philosophical inquiry for children’ and studied systems thinking around ESD. She also coordinates Djapo's operation for teacher training programs.
Why does Sabine think Digital Destiny is so important? Because this project fuses a lot of exciting ideas around ESD, blended learning and other educational concepts, leading to very enriching insights.
Wendy Blanckaert
During the ten years that Wendy was a full-time elementary school teacher, she taught in a project-based and integrated way, starting from real life world and questions. The didactics of inquiry-based and design-based learning provided an important framework. Over the years, Wendy became more and more interested in education for sustainable development.
Wendy still teaches one day a week. The rest of the week she’s one of the Djapo-coaches who help teachers to learn more about ESD teaching methods. With her expertise in inquiry-based and design-based learning, she manages to combine design thinking with the action-based thinking of ESD.
Wendy firmly believes in the possibilities of Digital Destiny. She notices that since the coronavirus crisis, teachers are looking, now more than ever, for ways to integrate digital learning methods into a classical learning context. Digital Destiny can play an important, guiding role in this. Moreover, because the project focuses on ESD, she hopes that more teachers will experience social challenges as a rich learning context.
Sara De Piere
How to provide children and teenagers with the best and most motivating conditions for them to be curious, joyfully investigate life and turn mistakes in interesting opportunities for discovery and learning?
For the past 20 years, Sara has spent most of her professional time looking for answers to this question. She did this by working in, with and for schools, as a teacher, coach and researcher consecutively. In the process, Sara specialised in the integration of societal issues as rich learning contexts at school.
Sara has co-authored at Djapo various publications destined for teachers and educators, on systems thinking, critical thinking, creative thinking. She also contributed to articles for Djapo’s teachers’ magazines and co-authored various children’s books intended to create a learning context around societal issues for Early Childhood Education. The last few years, Sara spend her time with research and dialogue with researchers from different countries for her last co-authored publication ‘The school as a place for practice’, where Djapo offers a practical theoretical framework for Education for Sustainable Development.
Djapo is an educational organization with roots going back to the 1960s. Since its inception, Djapo has been committed to empowering children and young people as critical and resilient designers of a sustainable society. To this end, Djapo has been pioneering Education for Sustainable Development (EDO) since 2011.
Based on a constant interaction between theory, practice and policy, Djapo focuses on the development, dissemination and application of didactic and pedagogical frameworks, methods and tools about ESD that allow the development of ESD dispositions of students. Feeling with and attunement to educational practice are central here. This practice is both Djapo's practice and that of students, teachers, school teams and everyone involved in community school, from kindergarten, primary and secondary school to teacher training.
Fueled by constant interaction between theory, practice and policy, Djapo focuses on the development of didactic and pedagogical frameworks, methods and tools. We find our inspiration for this in Education for Sustainable Development (EDO). ESD is based on scientific research and is put into practice internationally.
Djapo’s engagement in DDestiny is rooted in a strong belief in co-creation. Knowledge is an asset that is owned and created by all individuals and should be shared as much as possible.
DDestiny creates qualitative opportunities for teachers to develop their students’ disposition to create knowledge from the engagement with societal issues, together with others, and to share it digitally.
Greece - Kila
Ikaron 3, Kozani 501 00, Greece
Email: bratitsis@uowm.gr
Dr Tharrenos Bratitsis is a Full Professor at the Early Childhood Education Department, University of Western Macedonia, Greece and a director of the Creativity, Innovation and Technology in Education (CrInTE) Laboratory. He has participated in over 250 international conferences’ scientific committees; i
s a member of the reviewers’ board of 47 scientific journals (3 as an associate editor) and publishes regularly, having over 210 scientific papers with over 1000 citations on his work. He has participated in over 50 research funded projects, 22 as a coordinator (global or for UOWM). His research interests include Technology Enhanced Learning, Game-based Learning, Digital Storytelling, STEAM Education, Educational Robotics, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Learning Analytics.
Dr. Iro Koliakou is a member of the STEM team of UOWM and the STEM Coordinator of Αnatolia College. She holds a Physics degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, a Master of Science from the Biomedical Engineering Department of Imperial College London and a PhD from the Biology Department of Aristotle University Thessaloniki. From 2009 she has worked in the private biotechnology sector in laboratory quality management and research and development responsible for implementation and internal audits of European R&D projects. She has published 15 scientific papers in international journals and has 190 references in international literature. She has received teacher training from ESA Robotics and Automation Lab (2018), European Molecular Biology Learning Lab ( 2017 &am
p; 2020 ), CERN (2019) and European Schoolnet Future Learning Classroom ( 2019). She is a member of the instructional staff of the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Greece and has developed the online course Biomedical Engineering and the future of Medicine. She is an ambassador for Scientix, the community for science education in Europe, a member of the executive board of European STEAM educators association and a member of Science on Stage Deutschland, developing STEM activities related to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. She is a member of the Greek Women in STEM Association, a mentor for Real Science and a member of the Global talent mentoring program
Virginia Arvaniti, MSc, MBA, is a STEM instructor and coordinator who teaches Kindergarten and Elementary grade STEM courses and is responsible for coordinating after school STEM activities and developing STEM educational scenarios for Anatolia Elementary and High school. Furthermore she is responsible for developing activities for Anatolia College Erasmus projects related to STEM such as "GREEN EDU- Green education for a sustainable future" (KA201 - Strategic Partnerships for school education, reference 2019-1-PL01-KA201-065695 ) and “Open Mini Labs” ( KA201 - Strategic Partnerships for school education, reference 020-1-ES01-KA201-082706). Virginia holds a Physics degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with a focus on Atmospheric Physics, a “Master
in Business Administration” (MBA) from the American College of Thessaloniki and an MSc in Sustainable Energy Systems from the Open University of Cyprus (OUC). Since 2014 she is a member of the Anatolia College STEM team, while later on she also became a member of the STEM team of the University of Western Macedonia. She has completed several projects relevant to sustainability and alternative sources of energy with solutions that favor the environment. Furthermore, she is a certified Lego Education trainer for WeDo 2.0, EV3 and Spike (2019), and is certified as a STEM instructor from the Aegean University of Greece (2018). She has published 6 scientific papers in the field of STEM and participated in national and international STEM conferences and training.
The University of Western Macedonia - UOWM emerged from the merging of two Higher Education Institutions in 2019 (both operated for over 20 years), expanding its educational remit. It consists in 7 faculties and 22 departments, offering over 20 postgraduate programs and 3 in collaboration with other universities.
One of the main objectives of UOWM and specifically the CrInTE Lab (which is led by the Early Childhood Education Department but includes members also from the Computer Science Department), is the creation of new knowledge through the promotion of scientific research. The research activity is supported by the human resources (postgraduate and undergraduate students, scholars, researchers, etc.) and by the appropriate infrastructure, constitutes the most important factor for the improvement of both the Teaching and Education level. Fostering fully incorporation of ICT in everyday practice, the UOWM invests in innovative educational programs and multidisciplinary fields of research that correspond to the needs of the modern world. Till now, UOWM has managed more than 200 projects (both, National and European), thus being able to fully contribute to this project.
As a laboratory, UOWM has a strong focus on educators’ training and educational policy – strategies deployment, by participating in National and European research programs. Being an educators’ training facility, it supports and promotes innovative teaching approaches, such as eLearning. The main research interests of CrInTE are: Digital Storytelling, STEAM Education, Sustainable Education, Computational Thinking and Game-based Learning
Digital Storytelling has been the epicenter of our research over the past 10 years. It has been combined with other approaches, including Blended Learning and STEAM (connected with Sustainable Development). Thus, the DDestiny concept of putting such elements into one project idea emerged as a dream come true for our research.
We bring in expertise in Digital Storytelling by having a unique record in scientific publications on the subject. Being fascinated with the numerous application of this approach in various areas and contexts, this was one more challenge to face and conquer.
Moreover, the our experience in all the areas involved in DDestiny but also Erasmus+ projects left no doubt for our participation in the project.
DDestiny, yet another intriguing destiny, but certainly not the final one.
