The final day online in Estonia

On the last day of the online project meeting of AdELe, HKHK asked some guests to join us. The previous adult student of Haapsalu Kutsehariduskeskus (Haapsalu Vocational Education and Training Centre) Kaja Aaliste, who graduated as a Nature Guide this autumn, gave an overview of the Läänemaa Loodusfestival (Nature Festival of Lääne County), which was supposed to take place in May 2020 but had to be moved online with quite a short time. The Festival was organized from scratch by the adult students’ group as a part of their studies. It was a good example of how to be creative in adult education and put your studies into practice in quite a different way.

After that Tiina Alasoo from Tallinna Ülikooli Haapsalu kolledž, the cooperation partner of HKHK presented their specialities and the ways they had to re-organize and digitalize their studies during the spring period. They also pointed out the pros and cons of online studies based on the survey they carried out a week ago. The survey was carried out among both, teachers and students. Some pros that were mentioned were the possibility to record and better overall time management. The cons that were pointed out were mostly the lack of real human connection and passivity.

All the 4 days online and dealing with practical tasks were much more exciting than we could expect. Why couldn’t we expect that? It was our first time to do it online and we are also missing the real contact with our great, smart and wonderful project partners

AdELe became creative

During the third day of the meeting, after everyone had got so many creative ideas from the last previous days, it was time to go creative and start to put it all into practice. Every team worked on their own and tried the gained knowledge.

The result of this day is a Padlet full of AdELe Digi Grains – different micro-teaching objects to use straight in your classroom. The Padlet is still growing and all the materials of the teachers are also found in AdELe TOOLBOX.

How to be creative in adult education?

The online seminar “How to be Creative in Adult Education?” brought together five countries to share their best practices about different online tools and environments. During the day every country carried out training in Zoom and introduced the digital tools their school has used and appreciated during their distance learning period. As the goal of the Erasmus+ project “Adult Learning – It’s Never too Late to Learn (AdELe)” is to gather together all the best practices in different areas of adult education, the participants can now share the gained knowledge with their colleagues and add the international value to their teaching process.

The topics of the seminar handled the interactive presentation tools, integrating your content with different online environments, creating student-paced activities online, practical online activities with Moodle and activating teaching methods for online learning to bring more energy, connection, theatre and humour to your online and real-life lessons. All the presentations were recorded and are available to re-watch and use in your lessons. Now the project is going on with putting it all into practice.

AdELe went online

AdELe project started today in Estonia :)  Sounds great, but not exactly like that. Correction – the new meeting of Erasmus+ project “Adult Education – It’s Never too Late to Learn” (AdELe) started today online and will be continued during the next three days. The topic of the current meeting is “Extending and developing educators’ competences through the effective use of ICT” The participants of 5 countries shared their experiences during the distance learning period in spring. Every school pointed out their difficulties and challenges, showed their most-used online environments and talked about the gained skills and how their teaching-learning process is going on at the moment. Tomorrow we will continue with an online seminar “How to be Creative in Adult Education.”

Only four days to go

The winter is almost here in Estonia and we have only four days to go to our first meeting in Estonia. The Adult Education week that was organized by HKHK just finished and it’s nice to know that all our new parntners with the same interest in Adult education are here soon and we can start to discuss our plans for the next two years.

We have done lots of preparations and as always, something has definitely been forgotten but we hope that it doesn’t matter and the upcoming week will be full of new experiences, knowledge and friendships.

It is going to be a very international week in HKHK because besides our project partners from Croatia, Greece, Italy and Netherlands we have also two teachers from Ireland and 2 trainees from Spain, all arriving during the same day.