Evaluation of the transfer of training on digital competences by teachers and educational support staff to foster inclusion in the classroom.

SHIFT project is an innovative, inclusive project which addresses both professional and social priorities: the strengthening of the profiles of teaching professionals and educational support staff and the tackling of early school leaving and disadvantage through fostering inclusion. Different inclusion needs will be taken into account such as students with special educational needs associated with physical, intellectual or mental disabilities; students of foreign origin with educational needs derived from the late incorporation to the educational system; students with educational needs derived from particularly disadvantaged socio-economic and sociocultural situations; students with learning or communication disorders and students at risk of early school dropout.Within the context of inclusive education, where the diversity of needs and abilities is not seen as a problem but rather as an added value, the new professional challenges faced by teaching staff and educational support staff and the relevance of the use of ICT in the classroom become a priority. Towards this direction, SHIFT project has three main objectives:-To evaluate the transfer of the training on digital competences by teachers and educational support staff into the inclusive classroom.-To evaluate the multidisciplinary competencies, collaboration among all the agents involved in the classroom: teaching staff and educational support staff (teachers, special education teachers, physiotherapists, speech therapists, educational psychologists etc).-To improve the training received by teachers and educational support staff on digital competences in order to foster inclusion and tackle disadvantage and early school leaving.This project brings together a multidisciplinary and multicultural consortium from three different countries: Spain, Cyprus, and Finland. These three countries are among the European countries that have competency-based educational systems and therefore a common basis to work upon, yet their different sociocultural and economic background can provide insights on how each country interprets and implements them in their national curriculums. Moreover, the partners in this consortium have identified already, within their educational systems the lack of a sound and reliable evaluation model regarding transference of ICT competencies and multidisciplinarity competencies in the context of the inclusive classroom. Therefore, the participation of the three countries will bring to the project a broader perspective and will provide scalable and sustainable outputs within the European educational community.SHIFT is expected to generate results that enable the evaluation of the transfer of digital competences in the setting of the inclusive classroom and provide guidance upon the learning paths to be followed for the acquisition of digital competencies that foster inclusion. This will be achieved through very efficiently organized activities such as identification of inclusion needs, development of different evaluating methods and indicators so as to measure the transference of the training received in digital competences , identification of the digital competencies that have a positive impact on inclusion, establishing a relationship between training received and transfer, measuring and evaluating the Competency Gap between the Requested Competences and Owned/Transferred competencies and evaluating multidisciplinary competencies in the context of the inclusive classroom. The involvement of schools for implementation pilot is one of the most important activities of our project and will provide the opportunity to test the outputs of the project in real settings and gain more insight on the needs of educational staff and students with inclusion needs.At the completion of the project, two main results are expected: the creation of an Evaluation Manual with instruments of evaluation and methodologies to evaluate the transfer of digital competences in the inclusive classroom and a Learning Path Design for teachers and educational staff for acquiring digital competencies that foster inclusion. The multiplier events related to the outputs, our dissemination activities and our sustainability plan will guarantee the upscaling and continuation of the outcomes far beyond the project´s life span and EU funding.In the long term these results are thought to have a great impact on the digital training curricula of teaching staff and educational support staff in order to meet the new challenges of the inclusive classroom, on the role of multidisciplinary educational teams that will serve as integration facilitators in the classroom and eventually on the rate of failure or early drop out.