The EU has to face many challenges in achieving a more balanced regional development and sustainable economic recovery. Many of those challenges have to do with the ageing population trend, urbanization and environment under distress. More liveable and efficient communities is a target to be reached in Europe, where the “silver hair” trends can become a challenging opportunity, from a social, economic and cultural perspective. Despite those challenges are strongly interlinked, solutions provided in urban contexts not often pay due attention to the social process underlying urban trends and to the needs and behaviour of elderly citizens. GRAGE intends to contribute to fill this gap, developing winning ideas to promote an active, harmonious and inclusive citizenship for elderly people living in urban contexts. The consortium gathers ground-breaking expertise from different scientific background (legal, economic, humanities, engineering), from academic and non academic institutions, belonging to several countries (from EU and Ukraine). Using a mix of methodologies, the research and innovation programme of the project will evolve around the idea of citizenship as a collector of interest, healthy environment and suitable urban solutions for an aging society. Main themes will be: green buildings, food and urban agriculture, information and language technology. Researcher will analyze their role in transforming cities in environments that support green and healthy lifestyles for elderly people. GRAGE intents to boost dialogue through Europe, both strengthening the academic and non-academic collaboration and a practical understanding of elderly living across Europe. Such a cooperation can have a series of returns for Europe, ranging from a more effective solution to strategic challenges (sustainable cities and demographic change) to new business opportunities for European firms, offering solutions and products for smart/inclusive/ageing societies at global level.

“Teachers in the Distance” was an Erasmus+ KA2 project.There were 5 Project participants from five diverse educational institutions from five Middle and Northern European countries: Pärnu Adult Gymnasium from Estonia, Ventspils University of Applied Sciences from Latvia, The University of Information Technology and Management Rzeszów from Poland, KURZY ZEBRA s.r.o. – a private language school from the Czech Republic, Oulu-opisto - a community college from Finland. The participants met in an Erasmus+ contact seminar in Tallinn 2017 and created the initial idea of the project. At the time of planning the project the freedom of movement and its impact to education in the emerging necessity of distant learning was found as the most important factor to dedicate this project to the development of teaching languages in a distant way, to raise the ICT competences of foreign language teachers and to support the lifelong learning of language learners and teachers.As a first step, a large-scale survey of language teachers was conducted in all project partner institutions examining the experience of online synchronous and asynchronous foreign language teaching and various aspects of language teaching. On the basis of this, a methodological manual “Methodology for Online Synchronous Foreign Language Teaching” was completed under the leadership of the Czech partners.The next activity was foreign language lessons between the partners in different web-based conference environments, in which focus was on the possibilities of different environments in foreign language learning. Based on the recordings of the lessons and the research, instructional material on the possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of different web environments (Guidebook for Distant Online Language Teaching) was compiled under the leadership of the Latvian partners.In the middle of the Project Covid-19 pandemic broke out and the changed situation in education brought increased demand for distant teaching and online learning with it. The difference in the current needs of teachers for support and additional material was slightly different in different countries, so the project and its outputs were adapted to the current situation and the needs of the participants. The Partners in Latvia and the Czech Republic prepared translations of the Methodology into Latvian and Czech to use and spread it among the colleagues and partner institutions. Due to lockdown and travel restrictions the project was prolonged and teaching-training activity postponed. As it was impossible to organise a face-to-face training because of the restrictions in Finland for foreign travellers (quarantine for 14 days), the training activity was changed to an online training with the same duration. Led by Finnish partners, a five-day intensive training event took place in January 2021 in various video conference environments with the active participation of 21 teachers from all participating organisations, 170 web tools for language teaching were presented and many of them practised in international groups during the training for teaching different skills. Experiences with using different conference tools for teaching and possible solutions for arised technical problems were gathered.The results of the training activity and all previous materials and experiences were used for preparing the online platform where all materials would be in one place, systematized and updated. Our Finnish partners proposed to create an additional tool browser on the platform. Project partners divided the tasks among each other and all gave their input by the revision of already compiled material, specifying the topics and unifying them in bigger meaningful steps, developing a structure for the self-running online course, specifying the conditions for passing the course and obtaining the certificate, by compiling the texts and revision questions. The technicians from Polish partner implemented the technical solution of the platform with the online course, intuitive search tool for web-based tools and the former created methodological manual and Guidebook, also the translations of the Methodology into Latvian and Czech.On the completion of the project, following results were achieved:increasing of number of online courses and teachers providing online language courses;improvement in the quality of distant language teaching;improvement in the quality of foreign language training in distant language learning by making project’s outputs accessible to all teachers and trainers, by increasing the number of teachers and trainers educated in the use of ICT;creation of solid base for future cooperation and sharing good practices between project partners as well as all project partners and organizations taking part in the dissemination activities;increasing partners’ capacity for future international projects thanks to the lessons learned during this project.

<< Objectives >>iREFLECT! initiates the discourse on contemporary teacher education and training and will focus on an innovative approach also in the sense of lifelong learning for all phases of teacher education, by combining a reflection tool and the presentation of central content on the topic of reflexivity,. In this way, iREFLECT! aims to enhance the professionalisation of teachers and trainee teachers by expanding their reflective competence based on their own practice.<< Implementation >>In the project, 5 learning activities will be carried out on site at the project partners, which includes both on-site learning (job shadowing and expert interviews) and joint work on the project content. Between the meetings on site, monthly virtual reflection loops are planned for further work and feedback of testing experiences from the networks. Each partner conducts at least 2 multiplier events in their networks.<< Results >>The iREFLECT! project will offer a compilation of the didactically processed contents and methods for reflective practice in all phases of teacher education. This includes a ToolKit with handouts and a set of cards in which all reflective methods and content are translated into the project languages and English. For accessibility, all contents and methods are additionally visualised.

The main objective of METACITIES is to speed up, consolidate, align and leverage the existing MetaCity and Smart City initiatives of the partner regions, and through this, build the world’s leading connected MetaCity Region across the Baltic Sea (BSR). MetaCity is a novel smart city and urban innovation concept, focusing on open innovation which is supported and encouraged by digital environments and social networks. MetaCity is responding to, and leveraging on the post-pandemic transition to virtual co-operation and virtual urban services. MetaCity is an emerging regional policy objective, already in regional policy planning in Oulu Region and Latvia. MetaCity aims to expand ICT-oriented Smart City development to a wider base of regional innovation capabilities and innovation capture, including for example service innovations and social innovations. The METACITIES project connects a balanced mix of MetaCity and Smart City ecosystems: definite global thematic leaders, thematic followers, urban capital areas, mid-size central towns, and more rural regions. It will strengthen ecosystem collaboration between the MetaCity Regions in the Baltic Sea area and prepare the collaboration opportunity space. It will create a joint action plan for Baltic Sea MetaCity Regions and decide the action plan details in interaction with regional funding decision-making METACITIES aims to position the EU BSR area as the World’s leading “Connected Regional Innovation Valley” for MetaCity innovations