The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Thessaly (E-CE/UTH) and the Institute of Bio-Economy and Agri-Technology of the of National Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (IBO / CERTH) in collaboration with the Office of School Counselors of the Directorate of Secondary Education and IT consultant Mr. Charalambos Stachteas co-organizes an event on “Computer Applications for the Development of Digital Skills for Students“. The event will be held at the Xenia Hotel in Volos on Thursday 23 November 2017 and will last from 12.00 to 14.00. Registrations will start at 11.30.

The event is addressed to IT teachers, secondary school teachers in general, and to people interested in innovative uses of computer technology in wide-ranging learning processes, both formal and informal.

The event is organized in the framework of the EMPLOY: Digital Skills for Employability and Social Inclusion project, funded by the ERASMUS+ program of the European Commission and implemented from September 2015 to February 2018. The project aims to develop digital learning applications contribute to the empowerment of digital skills that have demand in the labor market for high school students. The research project involves organizations from Greece, Turkey, France, Estonia, and Italy.

The importance of developing digital skills is recognized by European Union initiatives such as Education and Training 2020 (ET2020), New Skills for New Jobs and the Digital Agenda, which emphasize that most professional activities in the near future will require digital skills to effectively run them. Based on this observation, people with insufficient digital skills are at an increased risk of being out of the labor market and facing, as a consequence of their professional marginalization, a significant negative impact on their social inclusion and active participation in local communities.

The EMPLOY research project aims to digitally program pupils in order to help promote employment through the development of human resources. The project has implemented a digital learning application that can be used in classroom learning activities to sensitize students about the necessity of developing digital skills and to encourage their further activation and engagement with relevant educational actions. The learning game exposes students to educational scenarios that simulate the use of computer technology in professional activities and promote ownership with popular digital services and applications.

The audience will have the opportunity to be exposed to issues related to the application of innovative, playful, active and experiential learning frameworks to promote digital literacy, the presentation of the functionality of the digital learning application developed under the EMPLOY project, presenting experiences from using the application by students and teachers. The audience will be given the EMPLOY software, supporting content for integrating the application into learning processes, and a participation certificate.

More information is available on the research project website http://employproject.eu. Professor Elias Houstis is the scientific coordinator of the research project for the University of Thessaly, while Hariklia Tslapata is organizationally responsible. Scientific coordinator of the Center for Research and Technology – Hellas is Mr. Dionysis Bochtis. For more information, please contact the following telephone numbers: 24210 74513 (E-CE / UTH) and 24210 96740 (IBO / CERTH).