A series of resources developed within the POLYGLOT – Multilingual education in preschool age project to support bilingualism from an early age are now being piloted in Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, Spain and Cyprus. The progress of the testing phase of the tools was the main issue discussed by partners during the 4th project meeting, which was hosted by CESIE in Palermo on October 5th and 6th 2016.
The meeting was a critical steps towards the completion of the piloting phase aimed at testing the methodology contained in the guidelines for educators, the guide for parents and the guide for educators on how to use web-based OERs to promote bilingual education. On the other hand, the meeting was a chance to jointly identify strengths and weaknesses of the two Moodle-based e-courses respectively addressed to parents and educators, which will soon be piloted too.
Parents, educators and children taking part in the piloting workshops are being supported by a facilitator in each partner country, who will be asked to provide a detailed feedback about the face-to-face workshops involving educators and parents as well as about the distance-support provided during the use of the Moodle platform. More importantly, all parents and educators involved in the activities will be asked to express their feedback on the contents and structure of the outputs, and especially on the methodology and the open educational resources proposed to foster language learning in children, which will be extremely important to deliver version 2 of the POLYGLOT resources. The methodology transferred through the piloting process will then be used by educators in their work with children in kindergartens, while parents will be able to apply the suggestions received to support language learning in children in their daily life.
Within the POLYGLOT project, CESIE was responsible for the development and the piloting of the e-course addressed to parents on how to use OERs for promoting bilingual education in the home-setting. For this reason, during the meeting in Palermo, CESIE gave a general overview of the final structure of the e-course, providing a detailed demonstration of how to build some specific activities in the Moodle-based e-course addressed to parents. The e-course for parents will be soon available online in English, Italian, German, Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek and Spanish.
POLYGLOT is a three year project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 2 – Strategic Partnerships in the field of school education, which aims to promote language learning from an early age through the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The project is coordinated by Kindervilla (Austria) and involves the following partners: First Private School Leonardo Da Vinci (Bulgaria), CESIE (Italy), Baby Erasmus (Spain), CARDET – Centre For Advancement Of Research And Development In Educational Technology (Cyprus).
For further information about POLYGLOT please visit the project website www.polyglot.expert/ or write an e-mail to: francesca.vacanti@cesie.org