Abstract:

The CS4ESD (Citizen Science for Education in Sustainable Development) project is a three-year Erasmus+ project (2018-2020) involving schools, universities, companies and government bodies in Greece, the Basque Country, and Wales. This project has been financed within the action line 2 of the ERASMUS+ programme, which seeks to promote collaboration for innovation and the exchange of new practices in the field of education and training in the European Union.
This project, based on educating within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDOs), aims to train committed citizens, by working with students on the meaning of sustainable development and on how all people, as citizens, can contribute to it.

In this project, a learning experience based on citizen science is being designed. Through this experience, students will understand the importance of environmental data, how to collect and share it, what to do with it and how to use it to better understand the functioning of our planet and, thus be able to manage it in a more sustainable way.

A key component in such a learning experience is the use of mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets. Thus, on one hand, the project is developing tools based on these devices, such as apps, so that teachers can adapt them to different educational and regional contexts and students can use them outdoors for data collection, and so on. On the other hand, work is also underway to create an online platform where both, teachers and students can use and share resources, ideas, data, knowledge and reflections.

Within the project, three exchanges of students and educators are planed. In these exchanges, among other activities, they will start working with the tools developed on the study of the Biosphere Reserves of each country: the Dyfi Biosphere Reserve in Wales, the Mount Olympus Biosphere Reserve in Greece and the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve in the Basque Country. In the first exchange, which took place in October 2019, students and educators from Greece and Wales came to the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, where they worked together with the students and teachers of the Sacred Heart School in Bermeo (Basque Country). The results of this exchange will be presented at the congress, as well as those of the second exchange, that will take place at the end of March 2020, and in which students and educators from the Basque Country and Wales will travel to the Mount Olympus Reserve in Greece.

Keywords:

ERASMUS+, citizen science, Biosphere reserve, ICTs.