The second live meeting of the Erasmus+ ABIbooks program took place in Timișoara, Romania from 29th to 31st August 2022 with representatives from France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Greece. The agenda of the meeting included presentations, discussions, and evaluations of the progress of the program. More specifically, the results of the work by all partners for the creation of the digital interactive library were presented to the plenary session.
The coordinators of the program (Les Apprimeurs) started by stressing that the initial objectives are consistent with the course of work. More specifically, a digital library of 118 interactive books was created, categorized by age, language, reading/math level, subject, and price.
- Of the books gathered, 15 are only English books and the remaining 103 are in at least one other language other than English. The books can be available in English, French, Romanian, Polish, Italian and Greek.
- 79 books of these concern preschool children (0-5 years old) and the remaining 89 concern children of the first school age (6-8 years old).
- All interactive books have specific accessibility features such as: sign language, augmented reality, audio description, narration, easy to understand and read, dys font and dys theme/character.
- About half of the books are available for free.
- In autumn 2022 the digital interactive library will be published by the coordinators of the program (Les Apprimeurs).
In turn, the partners from Belgium (Logopsycom) presented some sample books in created in collaboration with Les Apprimeurs and ARTeria. These books will be aimed at children, parents and teachers and will focus on mastering the basic skills in language and mathematics. In addition, Logopsycom highlighted important points from the evaluation of the results so far regarding the cooperation of the partners, the organization of the program and the dissemination of the results, etc.
ARTeria then clearly stated the expected results of the creation of the online training program: “How to create interactive books for the early acquisition of basic skills” (DIY Tutorial). The purpose of this program is to train parents and teachers to create their own interactive books through innovative approaches. The program will include 10 video tutorials and 10 practice sheets, which will provide practice and tips for creating interactive books:
- with specific pedagogical objectives
- adapted for students with Special Learning Disabilities
- making use of some recommended tools
The partners from Italy (Bastia Umbra) announced the process they propose to be followed for the part of the work they lead (White Paper) and all partners agreed. The “White Paper” will bring together all the experiences collected from teachers and parents, who were involved in the trial phases. Their testimonies and good practices will be shared and then research will be conducted by the partners on the topic of interactivity as a key to mastering basic skills as from as early as the preschool age.
Furthermore, the partners from Romania (Take Ionescu), who also hosted the meeting in their school, mentioned the supporting learners guide. Essentially, this guide will provide advice on how readers can use the books, which book to choose according to their needs, ideas for creating a complete experience around the recommended books, and finally tips for teachers to be able to make full use of the possibilities provided by such books.
Finally, the partners from Greece (Arsakeio Kindergarten of Patras) informed the partners about the dissemination of the results of the ABIbooks program so far. They recalled the objectives of the diffusion as well as the plan of future actions. More specifically, actions were proposed for greater exploitation of the results and all partners agreed to increase dissemination activities. Thus, the digital library will travel around the world, and it will be through your screens that the interactive stories will come to life.
The digital library is coming, highly interactive and intended to excite children, adults, teachers, parents, and all those who love learning.