Last Monday, Talent Maker reached its first year.
However, its origin dates back to October 2020, when the Education Technicians of the City Hall of Salt brought the University of Girona (UdiGitalEdu) in contact with El Pla School. Inspired by El Pla programme Talents, together they wrote a proposal for a K2 Erasmus+ call in Cooperation for innovation and exchange of good practices. Simultaneously, they sought partners in order to form a consortium.
On the 26th of February of 2021, Talent Maker was accepted and, on the 1st of March, the first project result of the collaboration of the Cathedra Tekhné (University of Girona and City Hall of Salt) commenced.
On the 13th of May, 15 representatives of the partnership, assembled by University of Girona (ES), El Pla School (ES) the University of Craiova (RO), Constantin Ianculescu School (RO), Action Synergy (GR) and Alikarnassou school (GR); held a virtual Kick-off meeting. This event allowed gaining a common understanding of the project’s timeline, its goals, the responsibilities of each partner and the communication channels of the consortium, among others.
In the first phase of the project, the Talent Maker team put forward a new Methodology that blended Talent-based learning and Maker Education approaches, intending to improve face-to-face and distance education in elementary schools. Its theoretical framework provides a rigorous foundation for their pedagogical and didactical scheme which includes: Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, Lifelong Kindergarten’s Creative Thinking Spiral, and Seymour Papert’s Constructionism.
During the second phase, which will be on until the end of the project, they have been working on the configuration of a Digital Capsules Catalogue, which will collect several activities classified by age and Talent, and the design of the Digital Capsules Templates. Both will be available in the Project Website on September.
Additionally, the partnership had a face-to-face Transnational Meeting in Craiova (Romania) in early November with 17 attendees.
They discussed the Methodology after participating in Talent Maker Workshops, the Digital Capsules Catalogue and its templates, as well as the first steps of the Teacher’s Guide. It served as a Consortium Training, which was extended with Creative Technology Sessions for the partner schools’ teachers, as it established the basis of the implementations that will follow.
Currently, the consortium teachers are designing ad testing their own Digital Capsules while phase three started and are developing the Teacher’s Guide with the rest of the partnership. The Teacher’s Guide, which will be available on paper and online in January of 2023, will contain the essential ideas of the Methodology, some examples of Digital Educative Capsules, case studies and lessons plans. It will be addressed to teachers, although it will contain some hints and indicators for families.
There is still a lot of work to do. Nonetheless, the Talent Maker team is proud of the done work and is looking forward to sharing the Intellectual Outputs for teachers to use along with Training for teachers and schools outside the partnership.
Because if we face it together, we can contribute to reducing the unfair gap generated during lockdowns between schools with resources and a majority of local students and multicultural schools with fewer resources and wider class diversity.
