How to engage your students into the process of education motivating and entertaining them at the same time? How to create engaging and interactive content using the best apps,  web platforms and ICT solutions? How to create a website or blog?

We have been answering these relevant questions at out Integrating ICT and new technologies into teaching and education course which lasted from the 26th of February till the 3rd of March. Together with 9 teachers from Estonia we were exploring a vast range of ICT tools and exchanging ideas on how to make a learning process more productive and interactive. ​

We have started our journey from a tool which can help to conduct and manage an online lesson, thus we dived into the world of virtual whiteboard (Google Jamboard) to create engaging and captivating distance classes and  collaborative learning experiences. Then we moved to the Powtoon app which teachers found very useful for grammar presentations and to outline and recap contents of the lesson.

Mentimeter was appreciated for its effectivenesss to engage students and ask feedback during the lesson. We also explored some tools for video-editing, like Magisto, which is perfect  for the creation of multimedia material.

Ed Puzzle, showed his usefulness to assign homework and autonomous work after school, especially thanks to the functions that the application offers to create a video lesson adding questions and discussion prompts.
Weebly is a web platform that allows you to easily customise web page designs through useful tools. The educational staff learned how to create their own engaging website, practising with the different tools that the platform offers. We created one common website dedicated to our course which teachers are going to present at their next school reunion.

Our participants appreciated gamification and quiz apps like Bamboozle, Socrative and Quizlet a lot. They were extremely enthusiastic about creating their quizzes and games for the subjects they teach and they were also eager to compete and try their “fresh” creations with the colleagues fighting in teams, thus we’ve also increased competitive spirit! 

In fact, they discovered that some tools are perfect to wrap up lessons, to personalise learning, to assess in a formal and informal way, to break up lessons and make them more engaging, or to challenge students to produce something for the class!
Teachers shared with us a lot of additional ideas on how to diversify classroom activities and shared with us their own Estonian education platform which is used nationally and seems to be really beneficial and easy-to-use. 

We were delighted to show our participants magnificent and multifaceted Palermo with its hidden treasures and mysteries, taste traditional Sicilian cuisine and go to a truly magical Monreale Cathedral where they could feel powerful energy and harmony!

​Everyone was happy and willing to apply for the next ELA course!:)
More info on this course at: https://erasmustrainingcourses.com/integrating-ict-into-teaching-and-training​