Interesting people - interesting practices: the Digiskills European Workshop as part of the 2014 EDEN Annual Conference

Wow, what a fantastic workshop! The Digiskills workshop was held as part of the Synergy Strand of the 2014 EDEN Annual Conference focusing of professional development, fitting to Digiskills' teachers' professional development aim. The Synergy strand allowed a kind of speed-dating style of practice exchange and presentation combined with deep conversations in the working group sessions.

We made a nice flyer neatly inserted to all conference goer's conference package (see it here: loaded to the Digiskills portal) and made sure that the conference programme displays Digiskills as the host of the Working Group 1: Synergy Working Group 1-TT (Digiskills): Inspiring teaching practices and competence development for ubiquitous learning.

Interesting to note, that Best Research Paper winner of this year's conference has an interesting and relevant topic for Digiskills, especially in how to build our community. You can download the research paper here: Corrado Petrucco, University of Padua, Italy: Digital Storytelling as a Reflective Practice Tool in a Community of Professionals

According to the participants, the Workshop went well, Digiskills kicked off the flash presentations on the first day, briefly summarising the project. We had 42 practice/project presentation in the Fairground session, not all directly about teacher training though, but all presented some kind of tool or practice related to online learning.

On the next day we had a 90 minutes intensive workshop session (see one of the photos here). It was highly interesting, the participants kicking off almost immediately in discussing future ways of collaboration with their practices. Participants were mostly interested in further education and adult learning practices, but applications and tools for all levels of education were also discussed. The 90 minutes flew by and participants didn't want to stop talking, so we invited them for the next day morning session to continue talks and offered them to record a short video explanation of their practices. This is one of the outcomes of the dialogues during the session: almost all participants suggested that the best way of sharing practices related to learning is: video. So to respond immediately, we booked our professional photographer for the next day to record some of the practices.

The next morning new faces joined our group and we recorded 4 practices on video. These videos are now in post-production, and when the editing is ready, I will load them all to the Digiskills site. We will invite them register and to load up new practices as a follow-up of the workshop and I will be posting several cases on the Digiskills Facebook Page.

I am now in the process of organising my notes on the workshop, I will be sharing the lessons learned with you soon.  Hope you enjoyed the event as much as I did!

Online resources:

Keynotes' presentations | Opening speech by the President of Croatia

Book of Abstracts: EDEN website (download) | issuu.com (online)

Photo Album | The Conference Group | Facebook event| #eden14 | The conference through your peers' lense