 Practical information for the audience before we start the seminar is being recorded and the recording might be used for dissemination purposes afterwards and please if you have questions, comments, thoughts feel free to share them in the chat. So welcome everyone and good afternoon. My name is Marta and I'll be your host for today together with my colleague Eleonora in the background. The focus for today of this webinar organized by School Education Gateway is digital technologies for climate action in the classroom. In this webinar the participants are introduced to the potential of technology in mitigating climate change. Teachers are provided with an overview of digital tools and resources that they can use in the classrooms to unlock solutions to combat climate change. I'm very happy to introduce our guest speaker today, Ariana Blazic. She's a teacher trainer, instructional designer and between ambassador from Croatia. She's a recipient of the 2014-15 Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Award at Penn State University and she is a co-founder of the Croatian National Curriculum for English Language Teaching and the Croatian National Curriculum for the use of ICT as a cross-curricular topic. She is also an external expert at the European School Net, where she contributes to the EU Code Week and last but not least she serves on the advisory board for driving key child innovation and starring group for the Digital Education Hackathon and EIT Initiative under the European Commission's Digital Education Action Plan. Without further ado, I would like to give you the floor. Ariana, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you, Marta. It's a huge pleasure to be here with you and all our guests and I hope they will like my presentation and then they will also be happy to implement some of the suggested tools and ideas in their classrooms. So now I'm going to share my screen and start my slides just a moment and while I'm starting the presentation I would also like to tell you that the presentation will be shared with you later on so don't worry about the links. You will be able to access all the links after the webinar and it will be published on the website. So today I'm going to talk about digital tools for climate action in the classroom. I'm going to mention some projects on climate action for students. Tell you more about my favorite topic student voice and choice and how it can be implemented while teaching about climate change and climate action and also a bit on coding, programming and artificial intelligence for climate action. So there is plenty of us to do during this one hour webinar and at the end of the webinar you will have enough time to ask questions. So as Marta said feel free to post your questions in the chat. But first let's start with an icebreaker. I would like to hear your thoughts on the role of digital technology in fighting global issues and also on the use of digital tools for climate action in the classroom no matter what type of classroom we teach in, be it physically distance, online or hybrid classrooms. So what do you think? Here is a favorite tool of mine, Woklep that Marta and Eleonora will share in the chat and you will soon be able to scan the QR code as soon as I start the activity on Woklep. So it's here. You can see it now on your screen I hope. Scan this code and or follow this link Woklep slash SEG 21. I can see that it's working. There are now 16, 17, 18, 19 and so on of you already with me here. You can't answer the question yet. I will wait for at least let's say 80 percent of you to join me in Woklep. Woklep is by the way a very nice tool if you haven't used it. Please do so because as you can see it doesn't require any registration so it's excellent for use in the classroom and also it's totally free for education so if you sign up with your educator account you will be able to use all its features for free so why not take advantage of it. So 57 of us in Woklep right now I think I can start the first question and then you can also join me later. So 60 I'm not sure. I think there are 70 of us in this webinar right now which is really really an amazing number. So let's start with the first question. This is this first question is what global issues have you addressed in your classroom? So we are going to create a world cloud. What global issues have you addressed in your world cloud? Okay climate change, pollution, hunger, deforestation, climate change now the top. I'm sorry just sorry for interrupting you as people are replying to your first question I would like to remind you everybody if you could please through the attendees if you could please check that your camera is off because it appears to be a bug in the teams up this afternoon and we can see you even though the camera should be off for everybody so please if you can be kind enough to check that your camera is off. Thank you. Okay but my camera can be your camera function. You're the one that you would like to see but in this case we can see other people and they might not want to be seen so I'm sorry it appears to be a bug so if you can switch off your camera thank you. Okay thank you. Well Nora so please do switch off your cameras and please take a look at my screen because it's really really amazing you have 83 answers we have right now so but climate change is the one of the global issues that most of you have addressed in your classroom. Let's go on with the next question which is an open-ended question. How do you teach your students about climate change? So here I mean do you do you use videos? Do you use TED Talks? Do you use PBL? Yes okay so you teach about inequalities but how do you do? Do you prepare your own activities? Do you prepare quizzes? Do you ask your students to work on the topics they like? Your experiments, debates excellent. Yes PBL a lot of PBL project work, watching videos, you experiment that's great. Podcasts very interesting e-twinning projects that's amazing so we have 48 52 and counting numbers but they are all different this is really really impressive to see how many different activities you use to to teach your students about climate change. Socratic seminar very very nice thing per share reflections, oral presentations, you also use wakelet collections so thank you this is really fantastic. Let's go on to the second question now my question is about digital tools which digital tools do you find most useful for teaching about climate? You will see we have three categories one is in a physically distant classroom so you can answer this one then click on this pop-up menu and then you will see online classroom and then hybrid classroom so submit your answers so we have kanpa balloon debate socratic seminar okay you can you can write your tools the digital tools that you use yes whiteboard tools for physically distance that's excellent and kanpa is also very good yes wakelet nearfoot and kahoot for hybrid because we can include also students who are not in the classroom for online classroom you prefer videos maybe there are also some other tools like a hoot yes mirror quizzes different types of presentations okay h5p excellent i'm going also to mention it wakelet here so there are quite a lot of different tools mentioned here genially partlet google classroom powerpoint youtube quizzes that i have teams pep talks assemble edu okay skumpa i have i don't know this tool but it will be great to hear more about it and adobe spark wordwall so many of you so we have 99 and 100 answers here thanks so much you will also be able to access this the report from book clap so that you can also explore some of the ideas shared by your colleagues here in this webinar and final question which is a rating question please rate your agreement with the following statements with one being strongly disagree and with five being strongly agree so the use of digital technologies is in danger in our planet digital technologies offer new solutions for tackling climate change and protecting the environment artificial intelligence has lots of potential to combat to help us combat climate change and climate change should be fully integrated in every subject so let's wait for a moment right now i think most of you agree that strongly agree that climate change should be fully integrated in every subject not only science but all subjects languages arts social studies all physical education so every subject okay now let's look at the first one the use of digital technologies is in danger in our planet so less than half agree with this so you actually more of you disagree with this this statement and yes so this there has been a lot of talk of how how much energy our use of the internet is has ink is increasing the climate climate action and change but environmental problems i mean but in fact there have been some new studies that have shown that it's not really true then digital technologies that offer new solutions for tackling climate change and protecting the environment yes that's really what most of you think that you agree with it and indeed there are really a lot of possibilities that digital technologies offer us to combat climate change and artificial intelligence has lots of potential so not so many of you agree with it but we'll see that there are also a lot of potentials of climate of artificial intelligence to help us on but not only climate change but all different issues that we face today okay thank you so much for these answers i will share the report with you later on but now let's go on and let me start this presentation with my favorite project that i did with my students in 2017 and i've seen that some of you who are now in this webinar have also been engaged in one way or another in this project because it's really a fantastic project that engages students not only from your school but from different schools in 2017 the project was in its second year and there were 250 schools from 64 countries that participated in it it lasted for one month in october and i involved my fourth graders so they are high school students they were high school students then and we did we dedicated the whole month of october to this project we didn't do anything else but worked on climate action project and we also spent a lot of time outside the classroom not only in the classroom the students had a lot of opportunities to choose the subjects they want the topics they wanted to do research on and then to do some action in their local community and their ideas were then gathered in a sway so we used sway for this for this task and within the project we also connected and collaborated with a lot of schools from different countries all over the world and one of the most enthusiastic collaboration activities for my students was the connection with a class from canada they first introduced themselves on a padlet but then we also had the live sessions where they talked about climate action in their local communities in crecia and in canada and it was quite a difficult task to organize considering the time zone and also the technology which we didn't have at that time but we managed to complete one live lesson with skype so it was also great as I mentioned climate action is a project that continues it it has grown immensely since since this time that I joined in 2017 as you can see there are more than 2,700 students participating from 146 countries it lasts for six powerful weeks as I say and it's and I'm sure many of you have participated in it it has just finished with a lot of excellent activities for all the participating students and not only students but also teachers so if you haven't joined please check it out and get ready for next year and then the next activity that I would like to share with you is about global issues that I created on blend space blend space is also a very nice tool that allows you to incorporate different types of media so it can be videos it can be text pdfs photos and so my students had to explore a global issue of their choice and then write a composition about it and also prepare a blend space so it was the results were really nice and they take out the different global issues as you can see here poverty earthquake global warming and so I I can say that the takeaways from these two projects that I did with my students some years ago was what George Kuros Canadian educator very nicely put as that the job of a teacher is simply to be the spark help build confidence and then get out of the way and I think this is what we as teachers need to have in mind need to do that we provide our students with decisions not only with the opportunity to make decisions not only small decisions but substantial decisions not only decisions about what topic to explore and what type of final product to create but also about the whole learning process because students are all different one size doesn't fit all so it means that we should allow them we should help them decide on their own learning pathway their learning strategies the resources materials they are they will use for this project at what the space the order of completion but this doesn't mean that the teacher is not needed I think right to the contrary and especially what we've seen during the pandemic when guidance by the teacher and support by the teacher is very very much needed and also so the teacher is here to to make sure that students have achieved the learning outcomes so I think that providing students with choice is very powerful for students at and that it helps them take control of their learning helps them take ownership of their learning and also this is how we help them become entrepreneurs or help them enhance and boost and develop their entrepreneurial skills and now I'm going to show you how I do it with learning menus and choice boards these are actually graphic organizers that I like using in my classroom so this is a learning menu that I created on a template in word so it's a real restaurant menu but I changed the food I swapped the food with some activities that I prepared for my students and so it was on the topic of plastic challenge in the first part in the appetizer as you can see there are three activities they are very short and they serve as a warm up for the project and so it means that they need to do all of them for example the first one was an activity with h5p some of you already mentioned it before so it's very good tool to create interactive videos which means that you can just stop the video and then add different types of questions in the video the next one the next activity was to read a text by European Commission about single use plastic and for this I use revertify revertify is a tool that helps students who struggle with their English language it shows them the simpler words so that they can understand and not only simple words but also explanations of these difficult words and pronunciation as well so it can be these revertify can be used on different levels and it students also use it to learn new words in English language it's used only in for text in English and then the final activity that was obligatory was to use a plastic calculator so it was more like a fun activity that they had to think about the items they consume on a daily basis then the main course also consisted of three activities but they were asked to choose only one because these were more complex and they had to dedicate more time to each of these that they of their choice and finally the dessert was optional so they didn't have to do it but as always dessert is irresistible so in the end they they want to do these activities for example a meme generator or a superhero maker there are a lot of tools that you can create your own superheroes or poster makers this one with canvas so this is kind of a wrap up that they did in this learning menu instead of these three activities I also sometimes use formative assessment as dessert so it's formative so they are not created it's more for it's more like fun and assessment and but they still learn so they learn in a fun way it this one is a very simple tool that doesn't require registration it's called edu candy and you can practice vocabulary with this tool in different ways if I also did it online so that they tell me the letters and then we try to figure out which word is supposed to be in the exercise and but it can also be played by them as homework for example or if you haven't tried it yet I highly recommend Quizlet Live which can also be played online but also in the classroom and students love it so these these are all activities this this quiz Quizlet Live and also edu candy can be used to to revise what you have learned because of course we want our students to to achieve the learning outcome so we can check with these activities or if you haven't tried Blucat yet give it a try it's kind of a quiz that is based on different games so sometimes students will also need to use different strategies because it's not only about accuracy but it's also about speed and there are also some power-ups that they can add so it's it's very similar to games they play in their everyday life but you can add questions about climate action climate or any global issue and they will learn by playing so there are only three that I mentioned here but there are many more fun quizzes that I'm sure many of you use and you have mentioned before and now I come to choice boards here here is one that I created on environmental issues so it means that students have to choose one of these issues and then explore it and here are my ideas but in the middle you can see there is a free choice so if they don't like any of my ideas they are free to choose their own and after they are done they have to create a book report here is another choice but please notice that in the middle there is a square that says free choice so again if they are not happy with what I think a report could look like they can add their own idea and I think I have noticed that they are much more creative when they have this this opportunity because I've also been I've also asked them to I gave them a certain task that they needed to create and then I wouldn't they wouldn't come up with so many creative ideas so I think that if we provide them with different options and leave them also this free choice so that they can show us what they know then we will get the results will be much much better and so and they know a lot they use digital technology for example for games or for for different purposes so why not connect their everyday life with their school life and so that they implement what they are good at what they are familiar with in their real life I mean in their life outside school with their life in school so it's always I I I strongly believe in that so in these choice boards you've seen they chose only one activity but these non squares are actually a tick that toll board so this this is a choice board that I created for learning vocabulary with different learning strategies and they need to choose three in a row horizontally vertically or diagonally but then in the middle there is always this you decide so maybe they have a better strategy how they learn to to be better in games for example so why not apply it here as well but the choice board doesn't have to have on nine squares it can be as many not squares but whatever you want so it can be as many ideas or activities that you you want to share with them however the there is more to it it's not only that these are these choice boards have nice colors which I like but there is more to it so it is I already mentioned that students are different they learn differently and so these this is a choice board based on different learning styles so I don't have to tell them if you like drawing choose yellow because they will do it anyway without me so but I make sure that it's it's personalized and this one is I did it in a different way this this is based on the level of difficulty or complexity so I can tell them yellow is very easy and simple but if you want to dedicate more time to it then choose the blue squares and the activities in blue squares or this one that I made for a lesson about national parks in the US and UK is based on Bloom's taxonomy with activities that start from lower order thinking skills and end up with higher order thinking skills so it's they can do all of this in this in the first and the second row or only one in the first or second row and speaking of bloom this one is about endangered species they have to start in the yellow circle which this is obligatory but the blue petals are not obligatory so they can choose for example if they prefer watching about endangered animals or plants or they would prefer reading about it and then in the green leaves are two tasks that they need to do so it's also they are given a choice and but then I can offer them different ideas on how they are going to present their learning how they are going to demonstrate what they know and there are so many many different things that they can use so why limit them to only some for example most often it's and I do it sometimes I tell them create a presentation or write an essay but if we give them this opportunity to choose from many different things then the results will be much better. How to make choice boards if you ask yourself how to do it I started with a simple Microsoft Word and then created a table and add colors to it then I discovered Google Slides which I use now more frequently because it's very very easy to duplicate and then I just change the content or whatever I want so it's Google Slides and then there is a genially that has a ready made choice board and also slides many they have many different types of choice boards and they are all free that you can use to make your choice boards and now just a moment I skipped one slide I also wanted to say that I use Google Slides in combination with Bitmoji avatars so Bitmoji classrooms are very popular and have been very popular during especially during the lockdown and so you add your avatar to the to this lesson for example this one about environment and then students can choose behind these links that you can see here are video lessons that they can then watch the lesson they can read the different articles and then do some tasks also I strongly believe that teaching climate change can can be done very nicely as a story telling story telling activity and here is one activity that I did with story cubes so I created these story cubes in google drawings and storyboard that they can be printed out but we are all in environmentally environmentally conscious so we actually do it online and especially in hybrid or online classes so what my students do is they create in teams they create these story cubes yes they print it out you will get a cube of course but if online you won't so they put different photos they put emojis icons and then they swap the their story cube and they need to write a story based on another team's story cube and after they are done they compare their story with what the team originally thought this story would be about and there are often quite a lot of differences between how they imagined what would happen with these images and what the the story was about in the end okay and now I would like to share with you a very nice resource saved with science by a united nations foundation I think it is also important that we combat climate disinformation especially at these times and that we promote scientific solutions to climate change so on this page you will find a readymade infographics and visuals that you can use with your students but also you can ask your students to create and then post to this foundation the their infographics the infographics they create visuals the photos paintings drawings or poems or anything else on different topics and you will find a lot of information scientific information about all these topics that you can see here energy global warming biodiversity and so on so it's really a very user friendly site and student friendly site so even younger students can use it and create their own activities that would combat climate disinformation now I would like to share with you my favorite website which is EU code week which has a lot of different resources for teaching coding in the classroom for all subject but it also has these learning bits these learning bits are lesson plans for students of all ages and these lesson plans are step by step guides that you can just take from the internet and then implement in your classroom and we have like 15 learning bits and one of them is dedicated to sustainable development goals so here is just a brief overview of coding for sustainable development goals for example for the first picture that you can see on the left is an activity or a lesson plan for primary school students and it relates to the goal number 13 then the the one in the middle is can be used with students in primary lower and upper secondary school about healthy life goal 3 and finally for secondary school students empowering girls and women and achieving gender equality related to goal five so these are very very nice activities so if you would like to give coding a try I encourage you to do so and try it out I'm sure you and your students will like it and speaking of coding and programming of course we I would also like to mention how important it is that artificial intelligence is used for good to for earth as they say so that there are really great potentials of artificial intelligence that can be used to for example give people more accurate climate predictions than to help people monitor the health of farms to protect biodiversity and also to monitor water supply so there are already a lot of different initiatives funded by big companies that you can read about and also you can take part in some of them and now let me show you how I took part in AI for earth hackathon it was organized by Microsoft last year in November last year for students age 13 to 18 it was a Imagine Cup junior and the learning outcomes were to learn about AI and then to create as a team an AI for good concept that could make a positive impact on the world around them and the end goal was to design and pitch in front of all the audience all the other participants to pitch an AI based web service that protects an endangered species so this is how we worked here you can see there were students from seven countries five students in a team and we were all given the all the teams were named after famous scientists so for example Ada Lobley's Ellen Thorning Grace Hopper and then they worked together for two days over the weekend Saturday and Sunday and so they learned about AI they learned about classifications they learned about algorithms and how AI can be used to combat climate change and then they had to implement their knowledge they learning in a project so of course these were these the projects were not developed fully developed during these two days but it was more like an introduction to what could be done in their local environment to help protect an endangered species so it was it was really a great event and I hope more events like this will happen for students because it really empowers them when they tackle some authentic problems and the teachers who who taught them how to do it were scientists who who work with artificial intelligence on a daily basis and so it was it was really an amazing experience not only for my students but also for me as a teacher and then I would also like to share with you this excellent activity and also a full lesson plan that you can implement in your classroom by code.org it is called AI for Oceans as you can see on top there there is number four and then these symbols green and white symbols which means that these are steps or these are activities in a lesson that you and your students need to take and so some are videos some are explanations and while doing this you learn about machine learning and how machine learning and how artificial intelligence classifies different objects and at the same time you learn how to protect our oceans so if you haven't done it yet please do so it's really really a very useful activity and also very simple so I'm sure you and your students will love it and now I would like to share with you this great project on experiments with Google so experiments with Google are different projects submitted by people from all over the world not necessarily scientists or computer programmers but whoever wants to experiment with AI or augmented reality as well they are all welcome to submit their project so your students might also give it a try so this experiment is about the it's called the heartbeat of the earth it is a series of online artworks interpreting climate data so you can see here that you can learn more about pollution more about climate change oceans also food so there are different topics and let me show one this one is called climate change impact filter this is an interactive machine learning experiment that visualizes what we might lose and what will remain as temperature rises so for example when you you can see here on top that you have different species insects birds wrapped out and so on so when you click one of these species and then move the slider on the right on the right hand side there is a slider you you change you actually make temperature rise or fall so here for example what would happen if temperatures rise by 3.9 degrees Celsius what would happen with sea lions and you can see how many 63 of them will disappear so it's an excellent exercise for students and to make them aware what that this is this is real and it is it is very important that we tackle this problem on the right hand side you can see what will happen if temperatures rise by 1.3 degrees for carpenter bees species and not only that for some of the species you you also have a prediction what the world would look like if these species is gone is extinct so here for example in this picture at the bottom you can see a city without birds the certain type of birds so what it would look like if if if this happened there are as you can see there are a lot of different species a lot of different tasks that students can do and then you can and you can develop a lesson plan based on that and here we can see how artificial intelligence can help us and finally I would like to finish this talk with google search augmented reality on mobile phones so this is actually it is it is not really an app but it can be used only on mobile phones not on it's not web based so you will see when you for example google sea turtle you will see this meter life size green sea turtle up close and then you in 3d and then you will be able to move it and and explore it and do whatever maybe you would for example for language teachers it would be an exercise in writing so describing certain species so it would be I think it it's a very nice activity there are different there are different endangered animals like these that you can see here but not only endangered animals there are a lot of different animals that you will be able to to see in a life-sized version in augmented reality and not only animals but also different concepts that students study in biology in chemistry so give it a try just go to google search and you will see if you have this view in 3d you will be able to to use it in this way but it can be only done on mobile phone and so this brings me to the end of the webinar and if you have questions I would be happy to answer answer them so now I'm going to stop sharing my screen because I haven't been able to see the questions thank you thank you very much Arianna before we move on to the question I would like to remind the participants that there is a feedback form my colleague Eleonora will post it in the chat so just for you to save the link and fill it in after the webinar of course so Arianna we we had a lot of positive comments in the chat while you were talking so this is great I'm going just to read a few of them we had one participants who said that everything was really interesting and he pointed out that indeed the outside the classrooms it's are one of the best way to let students to there with disease you and find solution so I don't know if you want to maybe elaborate a bit more on this point it's not a real question but but I'm sorry I didn't hear you I don't know maybe it was about the outsider classroom outside of yes I think this is a great opportunity to take students outside especially during the pandemic when we were actually asked by the head teacher to go outside so that we don't spend so much time in the in the classroom and now you reminded me of a great activity that can be done with students it's a geocaching so that you search for different objects in the in the school yard for example and explore in my school we have a very nice park around the school so explore different species and and also talk talk about it but in a different setting yeah thank you for elaborating this further and actually one of the questions we add in the chat was about the GDPR and while you're using all the tools that you present presented how how do you deal with issues of GDPR well it's I always read the small print of course and I all the tools that you have seen require no registration so students will not register for them and they will not give their names however their IP addresses you know and their digital footprint of course but so I try to make sure to to use tools that do not store their data or that do not store their data in the in on other continents so to say but that they are here in Europe so sometimes it's really really difficult but and I try I try not to not to I always make sure that my students data is protected yeah indeed it's not always easy to deal with this issue but yeah as the best approach I think is what you just explained an important thing is that the data are at least collected within the European Union and not in the external countries we don't have questions at the moment not more questions in the chat but people are continuing to post a lot of thanks and a lot of positive comments so before we close thank you of course for your participation and I would like to remind you that no certificates are issued issued for the session but the session has been recorded so actually you will find all the material available included the slides from Arianna so you will be able to access all the presentation the recording afterwards and to use it also I don't know maybe with your students or for your okay and the links and also the links I will put all the links in the yeah on the slide so in a PDF you will be able to to just click the link and it will lead you to the to these tools exactly okay so before we close I would like to leave you maybe Arianna one more minute to to say something to close the session because actually the presentation was was yours so I would like to leave you the floor one last time to close this webinar and thank you very much for being with us today it was really really inspiring and I'm sure really useful for our audience thank you Matta thank you very much for the invitation and many thanks to the participants of the webinar for their active participation in the in the ice breaking activity and also I hope that you will manage to implement some of the activities that I mentioned or tools I know there are many so choose those that you think would work best in your classroom with your students you'll know your students best thank you once again thank you thank you very much Arianna and thank you very much to all the participants who joined us today we were quite many actually around 130 something like that so it was really really great 150 actually so the participation was really really good so thank you very much everyone I wish you all a good evening and a good weekend and stay safe bye bye everyone thank you and bye bye bye