At the beginning of June in the Science and Technology Park in Niš, the organization "Teach Me" whose program director is Milan Petrović, one of the laureates of award The Best Educators of Serbia for 2020 given by association “Živojin Mišić”, organized a conference "For better education - Take the initiative".
Apart from the fact that we have all been waiting for a live conference for a long time, this one was somewhat different regarding program content. Namely, the organizers had a clear goal:
- to show teachers and educators throughout Serbia how much space there is for education outside the formal education system,
- how many innovations and other methods we can use when we have the freedom to self-consciously and professionally follow the mission of quality education,
- how valuable is the initiative of each individual for the overall picture of the education one's country.
"The lectures were organized in two blocks, so within one, we dealt with new ways of working, presented a video as a new medium of education, Amazon e-book, and asynchronous online courses. In the second block, which we called "New Literacy", we talked about digital, media and information literacy, financial literacy and finally algorithmic literacy. All of these topics are very interesting to our participants, but they are also globally interesting and innovative.” says Milan Petrović.
There were just over a hundred participants in the hall of the Science and Technology Park. However, hundreds of them watched the broadcast of lectures and interactive sessions via the live stream across the Balkans. In addition to lectures and Q&A sessions after each block, the organizers and partners designed a set of workshops that aimed to practically present innovations in education.
"Our program partner" Propulsion "organized a very interesting workshop on digital, media, and information literacy, and our partners from Erste Bank shared their many years of experience and work on the curriculum and materials for teaching financial literacy. We also had wonderful guests from KidHab who talked about the use of design thinking in teaching, colleague Andrija Pavlović AKA "Profa" who organized a workshop on recording educational YouTube videos, and we presented a game for teachers BAŠ Čas that we had designed as part of one of our projects.” Milan points out.
At the end of the conference, the organization "Teach Me" announced a partnership program with the foundation of the company "Nordeus". In the coming period, which we all hope will be a post-Covid period in education, we all need to fight together for a bigger space for teacher initiative. Also, for entrepreneurship, which we are convinced is a fundamental competence that goes hand in hand with lifelong learning.
