The world of education is constantly evolving, and the advent of technology has radically transformed the way we teach and learn. In this context, digital tools and online educational resources play an increasingly crucial role in supporting teaching and enriching student learning.
Digiteachers.eu is a platform dedicated to providing teachers with tools and resources to successfully navigate the digital age.
The site created within the Digi Teachers Working Online project, an Erasmus+ project funded by the European Union, is the final product of the collaboration between the project partners: Live(Finland), Tieke (Finland), Arbeit und Bildung (Germany) , Esment (Spain), Arfie (Belgium) and Open Group(Italy), the latter being the implementer of the shared online platform.
The website was built based on W3C‘s accessibility criteria and guidelines and is equipped with not only a multilingual translator but also a widget created by Userway that allows the user to: increase contrast, increase font size,increase text spacing, hide images and videos, increase saturation, change line spacing, and finally activate a special dyslexia friendly display
A key section of this site is the Toolkit, a veritable treasure chest of resources that includes a wide range of tools designed specifically to facilitate the work of teachers and enhance the learning experience of students.
Within the Digiteachers.eu Toolkit you can find a number of useful tools for creating accessible digital educational content, organized and divided into the three main areas of interest that the project was inspired by namely:
- Digital resources
- Teaching and learning
- Empowering learners
Within the three sections the user will be able to find 43 examples of applications and videotutorials focused on how digital tools and applications can be used for educational purposes, all while maintaining a high focus on accessibility.
Thus, in this section we reviewed the following applications: Howspace, Google Forms, Google Classroom,Google Workplace, Ilias, Padlet, Powerpoint, Thinglink, Canva, Instagram, Kahoot, Google Slides, Internflow, Whatsapp, Discord, Nesplora,sifting through all their possibilities for use and trying to have a focused look at how they can be declined for the benefit of students with special needs. Each application brought as an example is accompanied by a downloadable sheet explaining its use and providing key elements, explaining why it was positively evaluated, for the purpose of creating accessible educational products.
In the evaluation we relied on 5 foundational questions which are: What? Explication of what the tool is.Why? Why is the application useful in creating accesible training modules and how can it be used for this purpose.Who? For whom or what user group we think the reviewed tool is useful to use. Which? How and with what tools can the tool be used. How? How, under what licenses and with what type of access the tool can be used.
Each tab allows through a direct link to access the application it refers to, and all the videos are charged on the youtube channel: Digiteachers working online and subtitled in English.
Analyzing the statistics of the website we could see that already in the first 5 months since the website went online the visits amount to about 10900 and that the most visited section is precisely the one related to the Toolkit, the comments received were all positive and in particular, the ease of access and the clear and effective cataloging of the tools allowed many European teachers to be inspired by the experiences reviewed, hoping to be of inspiration to you who are reading this article we invite you to try our Toolkit section…Let’go and have a nice and productive experience!
