Our Project
START-DS is an Erasmus+ project funded by the European Community. It focuses on learning modalities that integrate the use of smartphones, supporting but not supplanting the relationship between students and teachers. Its priority is to address digital transformation through the development of readiness, resilience, and digital skills, helping to improve and support the well-being, knowledge, and awareness of students, teachers, and principals through targeted and personalised actions and tools, based on emerging needs, that can foster and develop their skills and resources.
The smartphone will be used as a tool for an active and reflective transition to a digital school. Critical and targeted use of digital technologies for teaching and learning is essential to supporting the well-being and learning of adolescents: digital is a form of progress only when it favors the human connection and the engagement in class of students and teachers.
The project directly supports the development of stronger school leadership and innovative teaching and assessment methods involving the use of digital. It offers useful functions to respond to the specificities of schools in terms of deepening digital dynamics and individualized interventions for each actor of the schools involved with the aims of an inclusive and quality education and training, creating engaging learning environments, enlivening student experiences, simulating situations, facilitating collaboration and expanding connections.
In particular, it is based on the collaboration and co-creation of action-research activities that aim to integrate the different skills and abilities of the partners involved to create tools and solutions towards the digital transformation of the school. To do this, the first year will be dedicated to the shared analysis of the needs of the actors of the schools involved – 500-600 European high school students, 80-100 European teachers and 15 European School Leaders – to collect their digital habits, their needs and the relevant issues related to technology that they face at school.
Starting from this ground of school experiences – learning and teaching, social skills and use of technologies – collected by giving a voice directly to those who experience the school, we will propose specific actions in the classroom aimed at a virtuous use of the smartphone that allows the development of relationships, learning and emotional skills of students. Furthermore, we will try to create useful and valuable tools for all European schools. In particular, the final products of the project will be the DEAR-Io application dedicated to students and the VOICE-DS Vademecum dedicated to teachers and managers.