Environmental Education through Envkids Didactical Framework and ICT Tools

Abstract

Global awareness on the need to change everyday behavior towards some more environmentally friendly practices has been on the rise over the last few years in the face of emerging phenomena such as global temperature rising, desertification, extreme weather, sea water level rising, and the potential resulting disruption to everyday life for large populations. Even if in most European countries a certain amount of environmental objectives for primary education are defined, teachers in the field feel a substantial lack of supporting implementation guidelines, especially for digital deployment in the classroom. Addressing this need, the work presented in this paper aims at the development of blended learning activities that deploy an explorative and collaborative didactical framework towards environmental sustainability training for primary education through a combination of in-class instruction, virtual experimentation, storytelling practices, and on-line collaboration. The validation activities carried out so far demonstrate a positive teacher and learner reaction and an easy integration of the methodologies and demonstrators into existing school practices.