News

It is with sorrow that we communicate that - due to the painful events and the upheavals of developments that arose as an echo of the tragedy in Tempe (Greece) - the conference hosting the PLEIADE Multiplier Event, has been cancelled and is postponed to April, 1st-2nd.  
The Multiplier Event will take place on April, 2th with the same programme.

We apologize if this caused any inconvenience, but we are sure of your understanding.
All our sympathy goes to the Greek people.

We are please to announce on March, 12th 2023 the PLEIADE International Multiplier Event will take place in Athens (hybrid format).  

The PLEIADE project is an Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership for Schools that proposes an approach to Teacher Professional Development to support teachers in establishing inclusion as a cornerstone of their practice by creating collaborative learning activities for their students. The project draws from research outcomes in several areas: Learning Design methods and tools, collaborative learning, inclusive education, practice sharing behaviours and, last but not least, gamification and games for learning. 

During the Multiplier Event, the Intellectual Outputs produced by the project will be shared and the main lessons learnt from the project will be discussed.  

The Event is organized within the annual “Cutting Edge Technologies conference” held at the Avgoulea-Linardatou Private School. The conference and the Event are organized in hybrid format and can be attended both f2f or online. 

Further info about the general conference can be found here: https://cet.avgouleaschool.gr/en/  

The Multiplier Event programme can be downloaded from here.

Registration is free of charge, but is mandatory, using this registration form: https://avgouleaschool.wufoo.com/forms/rwviykr19b0ysv/ 

Please make sure you select the 4 sessions related to the PLEIADE project and specify your COUNTRY in the same field of your institution.  

Feel free to share this information within your contacts!  

The third Short-term Joint Staff Training Event of the PLEIADE project was held from the 5th to the 7th of October 2022, in Sofia, in face-to-face format.

The partners were finally able to meet in one of the PLEIADE schools and work together on planning new enactments of their designs.

The 5th PLEIADE Transnational project meeting took place in Trani on May 12th and 13th, 2022.

This was, at last, the first opportunity for the PLEIADE partners to meet in person. Trani is a beautiful little city, and the Rocca Bovio Palumbo school, its teachers and students, were wonderful hosts for such an interesting event! Two days of intensive, much needed collaboration and socialization activities!

The PLEIADE project welcomes your participation in the following upcoming Satellite Events:

• February 15th, 2022 - 14:30 CET - "Listening to student voices on cultural diversity: a strategy to promote interculturalism in schools", by Christina Hadjisoteriou (University of Nicosia). This event will be carried out in English.
• February 24th, 2022 - 14:30 CET - "Games and Gamification for Inclusion", by Marcello Passarelli and Francesca Dagnino (CNR-ITD). This event will be carried out in English.
• March 1st, 2022 - 14:30 CET - "Il ruolo delle tecnologie per una scuola inclusiva e partecipativa", by Vincenza Benigno (CNR-ITD). This event will be carried out in Italian.

All events will be lasting 1 hour. 

The recordings of previous PLEIADE Satellite Events are publicly provided under the Creative Common licence Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Italy (CC BY-NC 2.0 IT). To access the recordings, follow this link.

Two Satellite events were carried out in December 2021, by Pencho Mihnev and Temenuzhka Zafirova-Malcheva, of Sofia University:

• December 13th, 2021 - Приобщаващо образование чрез LearningApps.org - available in Bulgarian [link]
• December 16th, 2021 - Inclusive Learning via LearningApps.org - available in English [link]

The recordings of the events are publicy provided under the Creative Common licence Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Italy (CC BY-NC 2.0 IT)

The first PLEIADE multiplier event was held as a pre-conference event of the ATEE spring conference, on April 20th, 2022. Chaired by Donatella Persico and Francesca Pozzi, this multiplier event took the form of a workshop, addressing 40 teacher educators, teachers, policy makers, school principals, researchers and other stakeholders interested in improving the abilty of European systems to cater for the diverse needs of their students through collaborative learning approaches. 

More information about this event can be found here. Participation was free of charge.

The second Short-term Joint Staff Training Event of the PLEIADE project was held between the 18th and the 31st of October, 2021, on the PLEIADE gamified platform. The event was supposed to be held face-to-face but due to the COVID-related safety measures it has been held as an online meeting. The agenda of the event was conceived in a very flexible way, alternating plenary sessions with group work, mostly at national level.

On December 2021, PLEIADE launches a series of Satellite Events, that is, short training events concerning themes related to the project held by internal and external invited experts. Each event will be held in English, Greek, Italian or Bulgarian, and will be open to primary or lower secondary teachers. The calendar of these events can be found here.

PLEIADE project aims at strengthening the role of the teacher and tackle school disadvantages, by improving teachers’ ability to design learning activities that foster collaboration and inclusion of students.

During the first year of the project, a blended training initiative for teachers was designed and is currently being delivered to a group of teachers from schools located in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Italy. Teachers are learning about collaboration for inclusion through a gamified platform.

Three Intellectual Outputs were released to the public in 2021:

IO1 Blended Teachers’ Professional Development (TPD) pathway: describing the teachers’ training pathway;
IO2 Hybrid I4Ts game: a game to support teachers in designing collaborative learning activities;
IO3 Gamified platform for the Blended Training Activities (BTAs): the platform where the training will take place.

PLEIADE Intellectual Outputs

Update on teachers’ training activities  

The teacher’s training (Blended Training Activities or BTAs) has started on 20 May 2021 and comprises synchronous and asynchronous activities, such as attendance of webinars and development and delivery of group projects. Teachers are working in groups, supervised by tutors from Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Genova, Italy) and Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. Teachers can communicate through a Moodle-based platform and their training is based on a space journey metaphor.

Three Short term Joint Staff Training Events (SJSTE) are offered as synchronous training experiences for the teachers, as part of the Blended Training Activities.

First SJSTE – 17-25 June 2021
ONLINE

This First SJSTE aimed at introducing teachers to the core concepts of the project (inclusion, learning design and collaborative learning) and to foster the community building process. Webinars and collaborative activities were organised by Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Genova, Italy).

Teachers had the chance to reflect critically on the concept of inclusion and share their understanding of the concepts as well as their teaching experience. Moreover, teachers analysed their teaching practices and read back some examples of inclusive collaborative activities they had already implemented in the light of the 4TS model (Task, Teams, Time, Technology), adopted throughout the project to support the design process.

Read more on the 4TS model

First SJSTE – Lesson learned and Perspectives

After the First SJSTE the following results were achieved:

1.     A critical analysis in term of inclusion assets and issues of five collaborative techniques, to be adopted in the process of designing collaborative inclusive activities during the PLEIADE Blended Training Activities.

2.     The description of already implemented inclusive collaborative activities according to the 4Ts model, that is the reference framework of the project. This activity allowed the teachers to familiarise with the model and re-design the activities in accordance with the new competences acquired during the SJSTE.

First SJSTE – Testimonials from the teachers and tutors

– ”Language barriers were difficult to overcome, but the experts from Sofia University were very helpful” Tsvetelina Georgieva, teacher from Narodni Buditeli 144 School in Sofia, Bulgaria

– ”Attending the Short-term Joint Staff Training Event was a very demanding, intensive experience, but it was worth the effort” Elli Stylianou, teacher from Neapolis Gymnasium, Limassol, Cyprus

– ”Everybody found the idea, the concept and the fields of study very interesting” Kleio Anagnostou, teacher from Avgoulea-Linardatou School, Athens, Greece

– ”The first Short-term Joint Staff Training Event took place in a very hectic period for us because we had exams. However, most teachers enjoyed the event and its gamified approach very much” Marilina Lonigro, teacher from Rocca-Bovio-Palumbo School, Trani, Italy

– ”The space journey metaphor suits very well to gamify the Blended Training Activities and the participating teachers picked it up very quickly” Francesca Dagnino, tutor and BTA leader from Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Genova, Italy

The participants thank the tutors from Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski.

What comes next?

The Second SJSTE is planned online on 18-27 October 2021.

The teachers are looking forward to meet in presence and that will be hopefully possible in the third SJSTE

The Blended Training Activities are expected to end in April 2022 and will be followed by Enactment in classroom context, reaching out to 600 students. The enactment phase is planned to run from February 2022 to March 2023.

Would you like to stay updated on PLEIADE news?

Join PLEIADE community

PLEIADE partner  Marilina Lonigro, teacher at the Rocca Bovio Palumbo school, presented the PLEIADE Project at the EDEN Virtual Annual Conference 2021, hosted by UNED, Madrid, Spain.
The presentation, entitled "PLEIADE in a nutshell", was given during the Synergy Session of the Annual Conference on 24 June 2021 and was attended by 25 participants in Zoom, while another 52 watched on YouTube.