The 3rd partner meeting of the project POLYGLOT – Multilingual education in preschool age was held in Badajoz, Spain, on February 4th and 5th 2016, hosted by Baby Erasmus.
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), İzmir Özel Fatih Koleji İşletmeleri (Turkey), CARDET – Centre For Advancement Of Research And Development In Educational Technology (Cyprus).
The 3rd partner meeting was crucial as it allowed partners to meet just before the launching of the piloting phase so as to jointly check all the outputs developed so far and to agree on a strict timetable for the following months of the project.
So far, the partners have developed and completed two research reports about bilingual education and about OERs for language learning, and a collection of guidelines for educators on how to use OERs to promote bilingual education in kindergartens.
Based on the research work carried out at the beginning of the project, the partners have now finalised the first draft of the four main outputs of the project: a Guide and an E-course addressed to parents on how to use web-based OERs and apps for promoting bilingual education in the home-setting, and a Guide and E-course addressed to educators on how to use web-based OERs for promoting bilingual education in kindergartens.
The next step of the project will now concern the piloting of the above mentioned outputs: the guide and the Moodle-based e-course for parents will be tested in each partner country with parents and their children in the family setting, while the collection of guidelines, together with the guide and the Moodle-based e-course for educators will be tested with educators and their children at the kindergarten.
The piloting phase will have an overall duration of 4 months. Parents, educators and children taking part in the piloting will be supported by a facilitator in each partner country, and will provide a detailed feedback on the products at the end of the piloting that will be used by the partners to edit the outputs and to deliver the final version.
Within the POLYGLOT project, CESIE leads 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. During the meeting in Badajoz, CESIE gave a general overview of the final structure of the e-course, including the evaluation questionnaires elaborated to collect the feedbacks, and proposed a timeline for the piloting and finalisation of the e-course for parents. The e-course for parents is currently being translated in all partner languages and uploaded on a Moodle platform and will be soon available online in English, Italian, German, Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek and Spanish.
For further information about POLYGLOT please visit the project website http://www.polyglot.expert/ or write an e-mail to: francesca.vacanti@cesie.org
