According to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) concerns 5% of children and 2,5% of adults who have a certified diagnosis of the attention disorder. However recent studies carried out by King's College of London show that the whole phenomenon is much wider. A survey carried out among EMPOWER ME partners highlights the fact that in schools involved in the project, nearly 40 % of the students have this disease while among VET CENTERS the percentage reaches 60%. The GENERAL OBJECTIVE of the project is to improve the academic/educational success and performances of students with attention deficit. Therefore, the SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES include, on one hand, the development of innovative tools and methods to promote teachers/trainers/educators’ abilities to adequately address the attention abilities of students. On the other hand, the project intends to provide students with strategies, tools, methods to manage their attention disorders and increase their attention ability. The TARGET GROUP includes: - STUDENTS: with formal recognition of AHDH or ADD disorders and also students with special behavioural needs including those who have behaviour related to attention disorders but no specific formal recognition and who represent the majority of the youngsters; - TEACHERS/TRAINERS who work with multiproblematic classes including Behavioural and Learning Disabilities students and EDUCATORS who work individually with students with Behavioural and Learning Disabilities students. Project EMPOWER ME! will foresee the development of 4 Intellectual Outputs (IO): - Compendium of Methods for teaching and counselling youngsters and students (VET) with attention disorders - aiming to provide elements to establish a theoretical basis to sustain the other three intellectual outputs to create. - Study Analysis on the characteristics and needs of the youngsters, students (VET) with attention disorders and of the teachers/trainers/educators working with multiproblematic students. - Virtual Resource Centre (The EMPOWER ME Centre) - designed as a virtual space where trainers/teachers/educators from different countries can find some information about attention disorders. They will also have the opportunity to interact with professionals and experts while presenting examples of good practices, especially in VET contexts, and difficulties they face in their daily practice. EMPOWER ME Centre includes information about teaching methodologies that promote educational success amongst students suffering from those problems and other materials and resources.- TOOLKIT for students including exercises and web application that can be used to promote attention skills. The project follows a STUDENT-CENTRED-APPROACH. This approach is considered as crucial to empower students and make them responsible for their choices because they will be active in the investigation of their needs and proactive in finding solutions. The project expects to OVERCOME SCHOOL FAILURE THAT IMPOSES VERY HIGH COSTS TO SOCIETY. Teachers and trainers are to be equipped with innovative tools and methodologies to deal properly with students with attention disorders. The expected long-term impact is: - creation of professional networks and communities of practice; - more profitable school environment; - improved effective study method sets on special attention needs; - improved awareness of the phenomenon of youngsters’ attention problems; - identification of innovative tools to provide quality teaching and training to students with attention problems to be included in institutional school curricula.

"Seeds of Tellers offers teachers tools based on oral literature (tales, myths and also nursery rhymes etc.) to help pupils master an autonomous, thoughtful and shared language, improve their cognitive faculties and facilitate the learning of reading and writing.FACTS19.7% of pupils in the EU had reading difficulties in 2015, compared to 17.8% in 2012 (PISA report). Only 4 Member States reached the reference level of less than 15%. The system has never reproduced social inequalities to such an extent, in the OECD particularly in France and Belgium. More and more children are entering kindergarten with delayed language skills and exposure to screens is making the situation worse. The lack of elaborate exchanges and vocabulary increases the gap between children according to their socio-cultural background very early on. However, success in learning is associated with mastery of speech, the foundation of all learning.For the sociologist B. Lahire, the mastery of the spoken word and degrees are the main social organisers: those who have learned to express themselves in public more often hold positions of responsibility.While 70% of professional speaking time is oral, this ratio is reversed at school: the written world dominates teaching practices. Oral expression in schools is very often directed from the pupil to the teacher, with the use of by heart learning and recitation. Oral presentations and examinations are prepared as if they were written documents. For the school, speech is born of writing. Today, the question of oral expression is resurfacing with new tests at the end of schooling. In Portugal, orality is emphasised, while in France and Italy a grand oral and a multidisciplinary interview are appearing.OBJECTIVES•To encourage self-confidence•To listen to and respect the word of others•To promote cooperation•To develop memory and vocabulary•To encourage the imagination•Discover and share the European oral cultural heritage•To fight against inequalities in learning which have increased during the health crisis.Training pupils to tell stories orally in class without a written support allows them to become emotionally involved, to experience pleasure and to pass it on in order to assert themselves as individuals and find their place in the group. Our credo: ""Listen better to speak better, speak better to think better; because when we think better, we write better.ACTIVITIESWe rely on oral literature, of which tales are a part of. Structured stories, from a common oral heritage, they offer a framework for reasoning, memory, imagination...Children's storytelling workshops have been held in schools in France, Portugal, Italy and Bulgaria.We have created www.seedsoftellers.eu, which gathers the 6 productions of the project (see results). Videos of adults telling stories have been made to inspire teachers.The resources are available in each language of the partnership as well as in English and meet accessibility and inclusion standards.TARGET GROUPSThrough the teachers we target students from kindergarten to 6th grade.PARTICIPATING ORGANISATIONS6 partners, 5 countries: 2 storytelling specialists (D'Une Parole à l'Autre and Grimm Sisters), 1 agency specialising in the creation of educational platforms (Les Apprimeurs), 1 organisation specialising in specific learning difficulties (Logopsycom) and 2 schools (AEPROSA, L. KARAVELOV)RESULTSO1-Pedagogical guide to set up oral storytelling workshops ""Storytelling at school to master speech"" (40 pages)O2-Multilingual library: more than 300 stories from oral literature to tell in classO3-Webradio: more than 110 audio recordings of students telling storiesO4-More than 20 videos of children and adults telling storiesO5-20 Educational kits linking the themes of the school curricula to the storiesO6-23 Pedagogical sheets to accompany teachers in the implementation of storytelling workshops in classUnder the aegis of the National Education and the City of Paris 14th, ""Storytelling Week"" enabled more than 120 teachers and 2500 students to participate in a storytelling circleFollowing this event, a project to train teachers in storytelling is planned. Financed by the French Ministry of Education, it concerns the Priority Education Network schools in Paris 14.Libraries, storytellers, teachers... spontaneously wish to contribute to the project, which we will run for at least 5 years.LONG-TERM BENEFITS•Fight against illiteracy, give a taste for learning•Reduce inequalities in learning•Increase listening, dialogue between individuals and cultures•Preserve and transmit European oral culture at school. To get to know traditions, peoples and the world better in order to prepare the future•To raise awareness in Europe of the importance of learning to master structured and autonomous speech."

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 466 million people worldwide have a disabling hearing loss, 34 million of which are children. They estimate that by 2050, the number of people with disabling hearing loss could rise to 900 million people. In Belgium, since July 2019, a decree allows deaf students to continue their learning in mainstream education until the end of secondary school in bilingual classes where lessons are given both in French and in sign language. However, the word “Deaf” only refers to those who cannot rely on oral speech at all, whereas technological innovation currently allows more and more hearing-impaired students to use hearing aids and cochlear implants, which means that they don’t always need to rely on sign language for communication anymore.The French speaking deaf Belgian federation (Fédération Francophone des Sourds de Belgique) estimates that around 13% of hearing-impaired individuals use sign language for communication which means that 87% of hearing-impaired people still need a different solution such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. This situation is reflected throughout the EU. The “Manifesto on Hearing Loss and Disability” (2017) by The European Coalition on Hearing Loss and Disability states that attending mainstream education with early cochlear implantation allows 44-66% of deaf students to attain age-appropriate reading scores.Nevertheless, these solutions are often not enough for them to hear as clearly as a hearing person, especially in noisy environments. Classrooms are a blatant example as they are often rather noisy, and their settings aren’t always adapted to the needs of deaf students. Lip-reading is one of the most used techniques to overcome this, but it is often incomplete since many sounds look very much alike on the lips. For instance, in French, only 30% of spoken language can be understood solely from lip-reading. At school, this can create a significant barrier to the acquisition of important skills and knowledge, especially since classroom settings don’t always provide the best environment for learners to successfully read on their teacher’s lips. As hearing-impaired students no longer exclusively attend special schools, teachers in mainstream education still need more tools to meet all their students’ needs.Transnational collaboration in this project is crucial in order to develop common methods and approaches. This process fits the current desire of several associations and federations such as the NCSA and the ALPC to form an International Committee for Cued Speech to standardize, update and modernize the trainings, use the IPA, and foster collaboration between the different Cued Speech organizations, centralizing and increasing the access to the materials.Goal of the project Our project aims to promote Cued Speech, a very simple technique for the hearing impaired to use with their families, friends, trainers, and teachers. It is a lip-reading accompaniment technique allowing them to understand spoken language, when used by the majority of people around them. Its French adaptation uses 5 positions around the face to represent 16 sounds-vowels and 8 configurations of the hand representing 21 sounds-consonants. These gestures accompany lip-reading, allowing for the hearing-impaired person to better visualize what their interlocutor is saying. According to the tests conducted by Uchanski, Delhorne, Dix, Et al. in “Automatic speech recognition to aid the hearing impaired: prospects for the automatic generation of cued speech”, this method allowed deaf people to go from 25% of understanding a complex message to 84%. It can be used in private settings with family and friends, but our project will mainly focus on school education and training. As it has been shown that the cost of hearing loss is highly due to social isolation and unemployment, such a technique can be an asset to tackle early school leaving and provide a better access to the labor market for people with hearing loss.Research by Hage, Alegría, Laybaert Et al. has also shown that Cued Speech can help in morphosyntax development, which leads to an improvement in reading, spelling and lexicon acquisition. These results bring great possibilities for other students such as those with learning disorders or a low level of literacy. The use of this method could thus not only foster better inclusion for deaf people but could also be of great benefit in developing the literacy skills of all students in the classroom.

According to the European Survey on Language Competencies of 2012, English is by far the most taught foreign language in nearly all European countries at all educational levels. Furthermore, it is a key skill for employability: the European Commission Study on Foreign Language Proficiency and Employability (2015) revealed that over four in five employers interviewed and three quarters of advertised online vacancies stated that English was the most useful language for the jobs discussed in all sectors and in almost all non-English speaking countries. But, even if many VET providers offer English language courses, that critical skill on the job market is not mastered by all learners. Therefore this need in training from many European learners has allowed the development, in the last years, of a large amount of mobile learning apps and programs, certain meeting quite a big success such as Duolingo or Babbel. Their success is not surprising considering that learning of a language is indeed adapted to mobile learning as it uses frequent and small lesson, allowing the learner to integrate a new vocabulary at a good pace but those commercial apps are somehow elitists. First most of them rely on monthly payment or subscription (10€/month for Babbel for instance) but even when they do not (such as Duolingo), the elitism problem with such program is that they leave the learner alone to face difficulties: they do not provide explanation and only a scares support. Therefore the students that are gifted or know where to find such support can do well using such tools but for the vast percentage of others (most of the regular learners, learners with learning disorders, socially disadvantaged learners) the tool is ineffective and results in them giving up and in discouragement on their own capacity to learn a foreign language. The tool is nonetheless useful is used within a frame where students receive the proper support, even more if that system can guarantee the certification of the learning process. Such tool can now be created by schools without a large investment thanks to the democratization of chatbot. The chatbots are computer programs using Artificial Intelligence (AI) which can conduct conversation. Their usage has increased enormously in the last 8 years with the internet of things but also with the integration on massive messaging platform such as Facebook Messenger or WeChat. As they are conversational agents and can be used on mobile phones, they are very easy to use for youngsters and virtually anybody else and have a great potential as an educative tool as they have all the tools needed for teaching pieces of information, evaluating whether learners understand the information given and send feedback to teachers to help them understand what learners understand best and where they have more difficulties, so teachers can adapt their classes for a better group and individual progress. Based on this NEED (transnational lack of English skills to fill the need of the job market) of our TARGET GROUP (European learners in general, VET learners in particular) and on the CONTEXT (development of the possibilities of technologies, AT and mobile learning + the barriers of the commercial solutions), this projects had the OBJECTIVE to create a chatbot and supporting material for trainers to be used in the VET sector in order to provide an innovative tool for supporting the learning process of the students in the English language, whether in individual setting or in accompanied learning and in fine to increase their level.Following the creation process during the project, the objectives have been raised and led to the completion of the following OER: - a booklet on the possible uses of chatbots in education,- dynamic Enligsh teaching content (for CEFR levels A2 and B1),- the creation of 2 teaching chatbots Mr Winston (A2) and Mrs Winston (B1) accessible on Facebook Messenger- their transposition and adaptation on a chatbot platform Tutorbot- support lessons (for CEFR levels A2 and B1),- a pedagogical guide on how to use and integrate the chatbot into teaching practice,- a chatbot design guide to support the development of other chatbots by education professionals.

"<< Objectives >>The Save&Game project aims to:1. Raise awareness of environmental challenges and climate change and demonstrate the value of co-responsibility among young people; 2. Strengthen the capacity of youth workers to talk to young people about sustainability, to make them protagonists of change;3. Promote scientific citizenship and green skills, providing interactive tools; hence, to prepare the citizens of tomorrow for a working world increasingly linked to the concept of green economy.<< Implementation >>· A1 Trainers material - It will be a training course for trainers, containing easy-to-understand technical information, illustrative sheets, graphs, and resources.· A2 ER & Toolbox – ready-to-use ERs, designed and developed to enhance learning on sustainability, energy saving, and consumption reduction. · A3 Action sheets & examples – to talk to young people about European programs for the environment, and good practices and to guide them in the implementation in their territory.<< Results >>●Interactive Guide on sustainability and the fight against waste and inefficiencies in consumption●Dissemination tools, printable or ready for sharing●Test of sustainability to assess the ""level of sustainability"" of a citizen/a community●3 Escape Games including 1 digital on basic scientific notions●DB of useful tools to create your own Escape Game●DB of Best practices and ""Action sheets"" to reproduce good practices on their territory●Website contains all the resources"