Abstract:

This article describes a European project that involves a consortium of 8 partners in the education field.
The GainTime project aims and objectives are to develop professional and pedagogic competences among teachers and trainers from secondary education. It intends to enhance Information and Communication Technology uptake, through the support of learning and access to open educational resources with the aims to combine higher levels of excellence and attractiveness with increased opportunities for all. The project in fact stems from the need of improving the professional profile of teachers through digital teaching methods related to OERs.

GAIN TIME project take advantage of the potential of online contents (that can be studied at home or at work) and class activities and laboratories, that can be customized and used as social environment.

The project identifies, elaborates and experiments a pedagogic process to improve teachers' competences for their professional development.

This is being achieved by planning and developing a scientific study on creative classroom, a manual about flipped methodology and an Open Online Course in teaching process based on the "Flipped Classroom" approach. This approach is based on the transformation of traditional classes into Creative Classrooms (CCR), namely innovative learning environments where the potential of ICT in fully embedded, in order to innovate learning and teaching practices in formal, non-formal and informal settings and to create OERs. The "Flipped classroom" approach follows a reversed teaching and learning model: learners watch lectures at home and use the classroom time to interact with classmates and teachers, especially through educational games in the classroom.

The adoption of this teaching approach and methodology will help teachers to strengthen the e-skills and the adoption of practices of collaborative learning. It will also help teachers adopting an approach based on learning outcomes and using new tools to stimulate creativity and innovation in the learning process.
At this point the gaintime project has already produce the Best practices Collection about the Creative Classroom and the “Master model to gain time in your classroom” Handbook and the book trailer (8 multimedia tutorials). Nowadays, the consortium are also developing the Open on line course “Flip to gain time”.
This paper describes the results of the first three outputs of this project: the development of a compendium of best practices about creative classroom and game learning, the development of a handbook of a flipped classroom and the book trailer.

Keywords:

Flipped Classrrom, blended-learning, e-learning.