Dear members of the educational community,
We invite you to express your interest in participating in the actions of the EduCardia project, within the framework of the Erasmus+ program, in primary and secondary school classes during the school year 2023-2024 .
The EduCardia project is an Erasmus+ program and it is coordinated by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, while the project involves partners from the University of Barcelona (Pedagogical Department), the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute, the University of Suceava (Pedagogical Department) and RIEEB (Red Internacional de Educación Emocional y Bienestar) which is a development agency for educational programs related to the emotional education of students.
The purpose of Educardia is to support teachers in assessing the emotional competences of their students and the classroom emotional climate. Based on the assessment results, Educardia offers a number of suggested emotional education activities that can take place within the school curriculum. Specifically, within the EduCardia project, ICT tools have been developed to assess students’ emotional and social skills. As long as teachers are properly informed about how to use these tools and how to interpret the results, these tools can be used at any educational level and by any specialty. For this purpose, audio-visual material with instructions for use will be made available within September, while an online course will take place in mid-October. The participation in the online course as well as the use of all produced material is free. Advisory support will also be provided to teachers who wish for it during the academic year 2023-2024.
Regarding the ICT tools, the EmoSociograms tool (https://emosociograms.com/) has been developed, which allows the teacher to register his/her students and facilitate a set of questionnaires to them. The questionnaires are designed to assess the emotional and social skills of the students. The questionnaires are addressed to the age groups of primary and secondary school students (ages 6-8 years, 9-12 years, 13-18 years). After filling in the questionnaires, the teacher gets access to the evaluation results of the students (e.g. emotional regulation, empathy, self-esteem) and group skills (e.g. , collective emotional awareness, emotional climate of the classroom). Any non-anonymous use of the data outside the context of the school is prohibited, while the results can only be accessed by the class teacher.
These results are useful for a more complete understanding of the students’ emotional competences and for the implementation of appropriate emotional training interventions. The teacher can make interventions aimed at improving the emotional and social competences of the students. To meet this need, the EduCardia SEL activities Repository (http://sel-activities.netmode.ece.ntua.gr/activities) was developed, which features activities created by emotional education experts. A weekly teaching hour devoted to activities hosted in the repository for about five to six months is recommended in order to see improvements in students’ competences. As a follow-up measure, the students could re-complete the questionnaires with the help of the EmoSociograms tool after six months to assess the impact of the implemented activities.
Any interested teacher can express his/her interest through the contact form on the project website: https://educardia.eu/contact/. In the same form you can also contact us for any clarifications you may need. Teachers can express their interest until the end of September. The EduCardia team will immediately contact teachers who express interest.
Yours sincerely,
The Educardia team