DoCENT final conference was held in Naples

DoCENT final conference was held in Naples

The final conference of the project DoCENT took place in Naples on the last week of September with the participation of over 80 international and local attendees. The audience of teacher educators and teachers experienced a practical and theoretical demonstration of the DoCENT tools and learned from experts in the field how to better match technologies with creativity in an efficient way to better engage students.

A welcome speech held by prof. Orazio Miglino — Head of Nature and Artificial Cognition laboratory of the University of Naples Federico II — focused on the importance of digitisation in higher education. His speech was followed by a presentation by Prof. Antonella Marchetti, Head of the Research Unit on Theory of Mind and Coordinator of the PhD Programme in Person and Formation Sciences, who presented an interesting topic on the interaction between robots and children.

The following speech was held by Luigia Simona Sica, coordinator of DoCENT, who introduced the concept of the project to the audience and gave the stage to the other partners to present each of the outputs that they were responsible for. The University of Barcelona gave a nice overview of the DoCENT model, developed within the creation of the DoCENT Framework of Digital Creative Teaching Competences. CreaTIC, another partner of DoCENT, revealed how to implement the training model of DoCENT based on the results from the workshops done with groups of teachers and teacher educators from partner universities. The set of presentations continued with the partners FORTH and EUF, both European networks, who were responsible for the creation of an assessment model of the digital creative competences  and a report on the existing and potential national and international certification programmes. Finallly, the last partner, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, presented the  guidelines and policy recommendations to educational practitioners.

The DoCENT partners invited experts in digital creativity to broaden the view of the audience on this topic. This is why six guest speakers were invited to participate in an informal round table discussion on digital creativity. Two of them presented their researches in the field of teachers’ creativity and computational design.

On the second day of the conference, the DoCENT serious game and the MOOC were demonstrated by the technical team of the University of Naples Federico II (UNINA). The DoCENT game application is available in 5 languages (English, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian and Greek) and the MOOC can be accessed via the platform of UNINA – www.federica.eu. The tools can be visited and tested using the links below:

DoCENT Game APP English:

//play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.smarted.docent_en

DoCENT Game APP Italiano:

//play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.smarted.docent_it

DoCENT Game APP Español:

//play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.smarted.docent_es

DoCENT Game APP български:

//play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.smarted.docent_bg

DoCENT Game APP ελληνικά:

//play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.smarted.docent_el

MOOC Digital Creativity in Teacher Education:

The whole DoCENT consortium thanks everybody who made this event possible and especially our invited speakers:

Antonella Marchetti, Professor of Developmental Psychology and Education, Catholic University of Milan

Alicia Sánchez Brualla, Teacher educator for primary and secondary school levels, Pre-doctoral researcher in maths didactics, University of Barcelona

Miguel Navarro, teacher educator and founder of WARKS, brand for X-Learning and education