Future Labs - TC on Innovative Digital Tools for Youth Workers

Many youth workers, trainers and educators struggle with the ways how to approach these topics, and new responses are urgently needed. This need for innovation in the field is also a political priority: in 2016, Innovation in Youth work was one of the priorities set by the EU presidency.  Since 2017, the consortium of project Future Labs is working on various outputs that will bring innovative methods to youth work fields; and this training course is part of this project.

In that framework, the specific objectives for this training are:

• To explore the concepts of creativity and Innovation in Youth Work;
• To capacitate youth workers in innovative approaches namely: Gamification, Photo Voice, Visualisation, Digital Storytelling;
• To plan testing of new approaches with young people and youth workers in a collaborative manner;
• To evaluate, adapt and spread the tools learned and tested in the european youth work community.

Profile of Participants

• Active youth workers working regularly with youth;
• Motivated to experiment and innovate in their daily work, by implementing new tools;
• Available to test the methods learned and give structured feedback to the organisers within 2-3 months after the training;
• Motivated to share the newly gained competences with other youth workers;
• Comfortable with filming - this training is part of bigger project, within which we will take videos of some methods used during the training and use them as instruction videos for the outputs of this project (to be used by youth workers after this project).

Methodology

The program will be based in the principles of Non Formal Learning. Activities will be mostly experiential and interactive. Sessions will be built around group exercises, games and looking at study cases. Participants are expected not only to learn the tools presented but also to envisage their practical application and plan concrete ways to implement them with their young people.

Because the main topics the training is about are connected to digital world, we will ask participants to bring their smartphones, tablets or notebooks with them (if they have - it’s not a condition).

Concrete programme is attached to this call.

Venue

The training will take place in spectacular location - Baroque style monastery Broumov, important crossroad of historical events.

When coming to Czech Republic, town Broumov and surrounding region might not be an obvious choice, but we fall in love with the place at first sight. Beautiful architecture, damn good equipped for events like ours, splendid nature around.  

The whole area of monastery is undergoing revitalisation process and process of “re-purpose” and it serves currently to diverse type of events - cultural, educational, societal.

In January we will have a chance to use multiple spaces of the monastery since it is an off-season. We will find there calm and focused space with damn good internet connection ;). Don’t worry, is heated up well!

More about the venue and region: http://www.klasterbroumov.cz/en/

The new technologies and innovations in education will meet in momentum of historical educational institution.

When planning your travels, mind that, for some, coming from Polish side might be an option to consider instead coming to Prague as first choice.