Varvara Petridou and Ioanna Ntinou, both Environmental Education Officers for Secondary Education Schools at the Athens B and Athens C Education Districts, recently organised a teacher training event entitled “Cultivation of new skills and environmental awareness in the school garden”. The webinar, which was addressing Greek secondary education teachers, was held on the 30th of November 2021 and was attended by more than 80 teachers from 50 different schools. The Cos4Cloud project was there too!
Specifically, Maria Daskolia, Dimitris Gkotzos and Anna Trigatzi from the EEL/NKUA and the Cos4Cloud team were invited to give a presentation on “Citizen Science in the school garden: Ideas and suggestions for educational activities with the Citizen Observatories of Cos4Cloud.”
After a brief overview of the Cos4Cloud project and its goals, the NKUA team explained the concept and practice of Citizen Science (CS) and the status and role of Citizen Observatories (CO). They also discussed the affinities and congruences between CS and Environmental Education (EE)/Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), as well they gave the outline of the current and future actions of Cos4Cloud to promote the integration of CS into the school context.
In the second part of the NKUA’s presentation, two COs participating in the project were presented, Natusfera and Pl@ntnet, along with the new interoperability service of Cos4Bio and their proposed use in educational programs in the school garden was illustrated. The final part of the presentation focused on ideas and suggestions for running CS activities in the school garden based on the educational scenarios developed within the EEL/NKUA actions in the Cos4Cloud project’s framework.
Finally, the EEL/NKUA announced the initiation of a nationwide Educational Network on CS and EE/ESD and invited all attendees to join it.
