Talk to each other! - In-Service Training for Teachers in the European Context (TaTo)The successful integration of refugees and immigrants in German speaking countries and the awareness for multi-/plurilingualism and cultural diversity in today's society are regarded as challenges, which require transnational expertise, especially in the context of education. In the framework of the project TaTo, a range of support measures using the expertise of professionals from various fields were thereforedeveloped and implemented. Transregional teams worked on four distinct Intellectual Outputs (IO).IO 1 “Plurilingual Curriculum” (PLC) developed a key document for the inclusion of plurilingual competencies in schools. In the course of the project, IO 1 “PLC” emerged as the foundation for IO 4, which evolved from the “Competency Grid” into the “Plurilingual Competency Model” (PCM). Both IOs were tested at the school district of Bozen-City Centre and in the Pforzheim school district. Selected parts were also implemented at schools in the school districts of Böblingen, Pforzheim, Salzburg and Bozen-City Centre. Both the school management and the teaching staff were prepared for the testing and evaluation of the material in various further training events. Furthermore, the implementation at the Pforzheim school district was scientifically evaluated by the University of Education Ludwigsburg (UEL) and the results were made available for the development of further training seminars.IO 2 “Massive Open Online Course” (MOOC) used contents from other IOs to develop four different MOOC modules, consisting of learning videos and teaching and working materials. The four modules cover the subject areas “self-reflection and acquisition of intercultural skills”, “interaction and communication with parents or legal guardians”, “PLC” and “PCM”. The respective IO working groups were responsiblefor the scripts. The production was undertaken by Bad Wildbad.IO 3 developed a curriculum for a transnational teacher training concept (TTTC), consisting of 8 modules – 4 compulsory modules and 4 optional modules – totalling 12 ECTS. 2 modules were implemented at the University of Education Salzburg (UES), the Deutsche Bildungsdirektion Bozen and the ZSL Bad Wildbad and evaluated by the UEL with regard to their effectiveness. Furthermore, the PLC wasedited for teacher training and the modules “DaZ (German as a Second Language)- transfer DaF (German as a Foreign Language)” and “Self-Reflection and Intercultural Skills” were implemented at the University of Pristina (Kosovo).The PCM of IO 4 is a product which goes far beyond the originally planned “Competency Grid” in terms of content and structure. It is based on the competence areas of the PLC. The structure is supplemented by references and examples of open forms of teaching. Using the PCM helps teachers to quantify their students' learning progress and makes it easier to talk about plurilingual competencies. Theexpected goals of IO 4 were exceeded by this further development. It is not only made available in a print version, but – like all other IO products, including the evaluation – it is also posted and available for free on the new homepage and thehomepages of the project partners.Due to Covid19 not all events could take place as planned. Most importantly, the dissemination event, scheduled for 13 March 2020, had to be cancelled at short notice. The AUL in Nuremberg, scheduled for May 2020, had to be cancelled as well. Other regional events, e.g. a multilingual theatre production, were also called off.Still, the production of the MOOC videos could be completed despite the difficult circumstances, which included a prohibition of direct contact thus making the shooting of the videos impossible for a prolonged period of time. The project's main goal – supporting teachers, school administrators and disseminators in their work with intercultural students – was fully achieved. Many short-term and long-termeffects can be observed among all those involved in school life.Short term effects: Legal guardians, students, teaching staff and school administrators work together more closely; strengthening of learners' self-reflection and assessment skills; change of attitudes; strengthening of language acquisition, interculturality, inclusion/integration; change of perspective (on multilingualism and languages of origin as a resource); interdisciplinary multilingual projects with languages of origin and school languages.Long term effects: teacher-student conversations at eye level, increased motivation in students' learning behavior. Both effects could be ascertained in the project's test phase. 2 modules of the TTTC were adapted for the teacher training curriculum and have been implemented at the UES since the academic year 2019/2020. Both the PLC and the PCM will be used in schools further on. Cooperations with experts were initiated and will continue after the project's official end.

Internationalization in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) utilizes policies and practices targeted to achieve academic benefits in teaching, learning, research, and industrial-societal cooperation. TEMPUS IRIS project successfully accomplished the goals of introducing and establishing the foundations for internationalization in Israeli state-funded colleges, thus improving their academic quality and competitiveness. IN2IT project builds on those solid foundations to bring internationalization to realization by modern operational initiatives. IN2IT aims to promote implementation of internationalization by developing innovative technological platforms to facilitate: (1) development and delivery of international curriculum by virtual teaching and learning; (2) utilization of interactive international hubs for communities of practice (CoP) of researchers; and (3) employment of global academy-industry/community cooperation.The collaboration of Israeli Colleges and EU Universities in IN2IT allows the Israeli partners to offer their knowledge in innovative technology and for the EU partners to contribute their experience in international academic activities.IN2IT outputs are: a framework to assess internationalization capability maturity level; ICT-based international academic programs including curriculum and supporting teaching materials; an interactive platform for CoPs; guidelines and pilot activities of international academy-industry cooperation; on-site and on-line seminars and conferences to disseminate the project results; training programs and user guides for application of technologies in academic international activities. Outcomes: developing internationalization capacity in the colleges; advancing accessibility to education in partner institutions; improving the quality and innovation of teaching, learning, research, and training in the colleges; increasing ties between Israeli and EU HEIs; enhancing the positioning of colleges in the HE arena.

Functional thinking is not only highly relevant within mathematics, but also crucial in everyday and professional life. It is, for instance, required, when modelling the spread of a virus such as the current COVID-19 as an exponential growth or when monitoring the redemption of bank credit. Unfortunately, there is vast empirical evidence that functional thinking causes a lot of difficulties for students what may have serious consequences such as school failure, and affect correspondingly, their private success as well as their social and professional participation.Embedded in the program “Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices”, the project FunThink aims at improving this situation through enhancing students’ functional thinking. The cooperating institutions are Ludwigsburg University of Education (Germany; coordinator), University Pavla Jozefa Safarika in Kosice (Slovakia), University of Cyprus in Nicosia, Pedagogical University of Cracow (Poland), Hogeschool iPabo in Amsterdam and Utrecht University (the Netherlands). Each of these institutions and in particular the members of the project team will contribute to the project their specific expertise and longstanding experience in supporting students through effective teaching-learning-settings, in pre-service teacher education as well as in professional development for in-service teachers – with regard to mathematics. Although the partners focus on different types of schools and have their specific curricular and cultural background, they share the common vision that mathematics education can be significantly improved by enhancing functional thinking from primary to upper secondary school. For this purpose, effective teaching-learning-settings as well as adequate pre- and in-service teacher education are crucial.The main goal of this project is to improve functional thinking in a transnational perspective drawing on the partners’ specific and complementary expertise. Therefore, one of the project’s objectives is to develop digital-embodied, situated learning environments for inquiry that can be implemented in mathematics classroom from primary to upper secondary school in order to support students’ functional thinking. These learning environments will innovatively combine promising elements such as learning with digital tools, real-world situations, and embodiment activities through inquiry that all have empirically proven their benefit in teaching about functions but have never been merged in a coherent way. Moreover, they will be worked out – alongside with extensive teacher guides – in in the sense of a comprehensive learning trajectory, i. e., they will enhance functional thinking in a coherent and continuous way bridging between different school grades, and hence, overcoming teaching different function classes and aspects in an isolated, non-interrelated way. As a further project objective, the conception of a corresponding pre-service teacher course is intended to enable pre-service teachers to effectively enhance their future students’ functional thinking through these learning environments. Particularly edited classroom videos showing more and less effective implementations of the learning environments will particularly encourage the reflection and professional exchange between the course participants about supporting students’ functional thinking – an important prerequisite for their future professional success. The learning environments and pre-service teacher course will account for and merge the partners’ varying cultural and curricular requirements, and hence, they will provide high transfer potential. In order to enlarge the beneficiaries of our innovative and promising outputs, a further project objective is to launch an open educational, interactive and multilingual digital platform equipped with the project outputs. An integrated user forum will afford for teachers, teacher educators and researchers to engage in transnational interaction, exchange ideas and experiences, discuss practice and learn from each other with regard to functional thinking and beyond. The project outputs and corresponding empirical evaluation results indicating their effectiveness will be provided in the six languages English, German, Dutch, Polish, Slovak and Greek; together with the worldwide availability of the digital platform we expect a wide-spread and sustainable implementation of the project outputs at the level of schools and universities and therefore an impact on mathematics education across Europe. In particular, the digital platform will provide mathematics teacher educators from all over Europe and beyond with extensive support for adopting our innovative course concept in their local teacher courses. In addition, regular transnational project meetings and the collaboratively elaborated multiplier events will disseminate the project outputs and support their extensive exploitation in European countries and beyond.

Currently, EU societies are facing many challenges: global warming, the COVID-19 pandemic, challenges connected to socio-cultural integration of migrants and refugees, increasing income inequality, … This causes growing social and political polarisation in and among societies. As stated in the Horizon 2020 BRAVE project: “building resilience to vulnerabilities that result from polarisation will likely require greater educational resources that address what it means to belong in the 21st century, beyond nativism and nationalist exclusivism.” There is a need for new means to train and support competent, motivated and highly qualified teachers, trainers, educators and school leaders. This teacher academy, TASC , will provide future and current teachers with the necessary skills to become reflective and agile European teachers capable of preventing, or eliminating violence, discrimination, polarisation, exclusion and bullying. We summarise these skills as sustainable communication skills. Bringing sustainable communication into schools can be the start of the social change we want. The TASC wants at first to develop competences of teachers in sustainable communication and will enroll in a joint training programme of 20 ECTS on sustainable communication. TASC wants to enable and fully integrate mobility models in initial teacher education and continuing professional development education in a green and inclusive way. The TASC wants to develop a European sustained and structured partnership between the providers of initial teacher education and continuous professional development. Finally the TASC wants to formulate guidelines for policymakers to implement sustainable communication as a crucial cross-cutting competence for teachers and teacher trainers. The consortium established for the TASC involves 12 partners of 7 countries, all involved in (initial) teacher training and/or continuous professional development.

"<< Background >>Virtual or blended mobility, or virtual exchange cooperations, need to be promoted within universities, academic faculty members need to be trained, infrastructure like digital platforms need to be fit for the cooperation of two or more partners. The fact that we focus on virtual forms of cooperation is based on the intention to make our cooperation both more inclusive and greener in the sense that we want to offer our students international experiences that take into account the need to make our lifestyles more sustainable. Environmental impact, climate change and pollution of our environment make no halt at national borders. This is why collaborating with international partners in this field is of the utmost importance.We focus on Education for Sustainable Development. All lectures and seminars we wish to introduce in form of a curriculum that is being developed will address issues connected with ESD. The target audience will be students of teacher education (TE), as all the partner institutions are specialised in teacher training. We include TE for primary and secondary education in this project. It is our belief that the target group of future teachers is the perfect group of multipliers for the important task of spreading the idea of a more sustainable and environment-friendly way of life. As we see the task of universities in the 21st century in combining teaching and research not only with the transfer of knowledge, but also with the renewal of our society, we consider our students as change agents. With our project we hope to contribute towards achieving the SDGs. But not only the ESD content, also the application of sustainable intercultural collaboration will be transported by our students to their future school classes: their experience of Virtual Exchange will be the basis for their own implementation of VE in schools. At some of our partners, seminars on ESD are already part of the curriculum or at least part of the offer made to students. At PUK, however, ESD is not at all part of teacher education programmes. This is why we decided to collaborate and to open the existing classes at the other partners to students of PUK. In order to do so, we need to change the teaching format: Teaching will have to be done virtually, and the classes will have to be delivered in English. Despite the fact that our faculty is familiar with online teaching, the format of Virtual Exchange is still new to most. This is why we will develop a staff training framework, addressing both the general aspects of design and implementation of Virtual Exchange in our context of ESD, but also adding a new component of how to mentor students in a virtual environment, enabling them to open up for the intercultural experience and for behavioral change, developing the attitude of a teacher as change agent. Having in mind that intercultural exchange does not always lead to intercultural learning and growth – not even by going for a semester abroad –, we will develop a systematic material collection for pre-trained faculty on virtual intercultural mentoring with a focus on our ""green"" context. Opening classes for virtual mobility also brings up the question of recognition. The development towards virtual mobility is not well represented in previous recognition processes at HEIs. There is currently no possibility of enrolling or recognising virtual mobilities. This needs to be addressed in the project, and put into relation to the Erasmus without paper (EWP) process that is about to start this year and to which we all committed ourselves. Lastly, as we realise the need for certified professional development of in-service teachers, we decided to provide micro credentials as a way of certifying the participation of in-service teachers in our ESD curriculum, strengthening the role of our institutions in lifelong learning.<< Objectives >>The goal of the partner organisations is to strengthen their cooperation through this project by introducing virtual forms of collaboration, in order to make internationalisation both more inclusive and more eco-friendly. The structures for this closer, yet ""green"" cooperation are to be set up by NETT DEVISE.In order to do so, we commonly develop a curriculum around Education for Sustainable Development for our students of teacher education. We involve our teaching faculty in this, create new courses (Virtual Exchange cooperations) and train the faculty members to better be able to design and implement those. Having more virtual offers and more offers taught in English is one of the objectives that all partners have. Another important goal is to strengthen the digital skills of both teaching faculty and students of TE, as well as in-service teachers. The current situation made it way too clear that a lot has to be done in this field - especially in Germany, where the digitalisation of schools has so far not been a political priority. Our students will be assigned tasks of virtual cooperation, and working on these tasks will help them to develop digital literacy.As the project takes a structural approach to introduce sustainable internationalisation in teacher education, the international offices of all partner institutions are involved as central coordinators in the administration of the project. These units have been chosen because we all want to build structures that facilitate and upscale virtual cooperation in the future, and secure the quality of Virtual Exchange for students. As the project also includes numerous activities relating to administrative procedures, further administrative staff will be involved (e.g. the responsibles for Campus Management Systems, E-Learning etc.), thus spreading internationalisation measures within our institutions.<< Implementation >>The overreaching subject of our cooperation is Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). With this in mind, we are planning on implementing the following activities:- Virtual and blended mobility offers, including two Learning, Teaching and Training Activities (LTTAs), as well as Virtual Exchange experiences in order to make international experiences more inclusive and facilitate the access and participation of target groups with fewer opportunities. All teaching activity has a focus on ESD. - A Virtual Exchange training programme for academic faculty, developed on individual needs and according to the objectives of all partner universities (we will develop a framework).- The development of a mentoring programme for students participating in the Virtual Exchanges (we will develop a tool kit for faculty).- An evaluation of the new forms of cooperation with focus on the achievment of intercultural competence.We are planning to use different digital tools and online platforms, for example Moodle and eTwinning, to further develop digital skills and competences of both students and staff.<< Results >>We plan to realise six project results and two LTTAs within NETT DEVISE. PR1: This project result consists of the development of a curriculum on ESD for students of teacher education and for in-service teachers. All partner universities will offer courses taught both in English and virtually for participation of the students and associated teachers of the project partners. Responsible project leaders are PUK and VIAA. PR2: Means to accredit the ECTS, full recognition of participation in virtual mobility, virtual exchange cooperations and blended mobility. PR leaders: LUE and PHFR. There are strong links to PR 1, PR 3 and to PR 4.PR3: Green intercultural mentoring programme/tool kit to intensify the experience for students. Leading institutions: PHFR, HAN and LUE. There is a link to PR 4.PR 4: Training programme/framework for academic teachers for designing and implementing class-to-class Virtual Exchange (and introduction of Virtual Exchange cooperations amongst the partner institutions). PR leaders: PHFR and PUK. This PR is linked to PR 3.PR5: Evaluation of intercultural competencies earned in the different mobility programmes – physical, virtual mobility, blended mobility, virtual exchange cooperations. PR leaders: VIAA and HAN. Links exist to PRs 1 and 4 as well as to the Learning, Teaching and Training Activities. PR6: Creation of a micro-credential for the participation in the curriculum created by PR 1. Project leaders: PHFR and LUE."