The Play-Create-Learn Summer Academy 2018 is specifically designed for school teachers and other educators who are interested in enriching their teaching practices with play, games, and creativity. It is an innovative and flexible European professional development course which aims to help educators from diverse cotexts to experiment with, and reflect on, aspects and uses of innovative playful and creative learning activities in classrooms and beyond, with an eye to addressing the needs of today's students as tomorrow's citizens in the 'brave new world' of the 21st century.
The specific objectives of the Academy are the following:
- To allow every participant to adapt the training experience to their own interests and teaching realities, and build their own personal path from theory to teaching practice
- To acquaint participants with the opportunities and challenges for 21st-century pedagogy in classrooms and other learning spaces exploiting the potential of play, games, and other approaches fostering creativity in education
- To present the basic concepts, methods and options available to teachers for playful, game-based and creative learning in the classroom and beyond
- To demonstrate diverse examples of playful, game-based and creative learning in practice
- To provide participants with direct hands-on experience of innovative teaching activities from the context of successful European projects and international initiatives
- To enable participants to find, select, adapt, and apply innovative teaching techniques and tools that will help them offer their students attractive and effective playful, game-based and creative learning experiences
- To develop educators' ICT skills through hands-on use and application of various educational technology tools, including by engaging them in exploiting, designing, and sharing digital educational resources in on-line educational repositories and communities, as well as by acquainting them with the potential of popular social media tools for education.
- To foster the culture of collaboration among teachers of different disciplines and from various geographical and cultural contexts in Europe.
Overall, the course has a significant and important European dimension: Participants from all over Europe will become part of an active and growing community of practice to exchange and share ideas, experiences, concerns and educational resources with fellow teachers across Europe.
