INNOVATE AND INCREASING AWARENESS OF GREEN ECONOMY THROUGH DIGITAL TOOLS: RESULTS FROM THE EVALUATION PROCESS IN VET TEACHERS

Globally there is a huge campaign for promoting Green Economy through different ways. But why can’t this be through formal education? This is a question which arises in order to check how its specific procedure was designed. In the frame of formal education there are many tools and different methods for learning. ICT’s in education gives the advantage of the information promoting the knowledge of learners. Social media spreads the knowledge and contributes to skill development. Problem Based learning (PBL) is a learning method where the learners try to find the solution by themselves, through a collaborative problem solving process but with a strong self-motivated way.

This paper presents an innovate approach of increasing the awareness of Green Economy and provides a viewpoint with regard to the use of digital tools to assist learning and qualifications.

A workshop where digital tools, social media, and PBL methodology has been applied in 5 different European countries. 136 Vocational Educational Training (VET) teachers have participated. The workshops took place during June 2013-September 2014. The workshop has as a main subject, Green Economy using digital tools. For this purpose, the workshops took place in organized computer laboratories. All participants had in their convenience, a PC with digital tools for making videos. At the beginning of the workshop, videos with instructions on how to create a video were presented. These videos were available on each PC so that each participant has access when it was needed. Subsequently, and using the PBL method, each participant was asked to make their own video with a theme of something relevant with Green Economy.

When the workshop ended the participants were asked to evaluate their experience. For this purpose a structured questionnaire was given. The questionnaire included five parts. The first part was about demographics. The second part was closed questions where the participants had to score using the scale for 1 to 5 about the familiarity with specific concepts and tools. The third part referred to the specific workshop experience. The fourth part was the level of understanding and familiarity after the workshop was completed, and the last part includes three further open questions, where the participants could express freely their opinions about the procedure. At this point we have to notice that the questionnaires were anonymous.
From the results of the evaluation we can conclude that the participants improved their qualification using digital tools and became more familiar with Green Economy in a higher level. The encouraging result is that after their experience they have revised their opinion about how they can promote Green Economy in their classroom and in formal education.