Competence in spatial thinking, usage of maps or other spatial tools is not self-evident for all; it is a dexterity, which can be cultivated. Strengthening spatial thinking in school education has been linked to positive results, such as success in STEM, promotion of innovation and mitigation of social inequalities. For students with visual impairment (VI), spatial thinking is, additionally, a critical compensatory ability for functionally utilizing spatial experiences. It can contribute to students’ mobility, independence, academic progress, social integration and professional development. Spatial thinking can provide a basis for inclusive education, through open-ended problem solving tasks and scientific inquiry activities, which stimulate students' interest and promote cooperation in the classroom, with multiple benefits for all students. Tactile maps, as well as innovative spatial tools exploiting Information and Communication Technologies, can be valuable aids in this direction.Project “VISTE: Empowering Spatial Thinking of Students with Visual Impairment” was a Strategic Partnership for school education supporting innovation and the exchange of good practices, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union (9/2016 – 8/2019).The project’s mission was to create a methodological, semantic and technical infrastructure for cultivating spatial thinking in inclusive educational environments. The objectives were: •to address the needs of school students with VI, by strengthening their spatial skills, and •to cultivate these skills through cooperative activities with sighted students, so as to enhance integration of students with VI in mainstream education. The project’s main target groups were school students (11-15 years old), teachers, teachers’ trainers and other professionals involved in education.The consortium consisted of 5 partners from 4 European countries: the National Technical University of Athens (Co-ordinator, Greece), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (France), INTRASOFT SA (Luxembourg), Casa Corpului Didactic Cluj (Romania), Eidiko Dimotiko Sxolio Tiflon Kallitheas (Greece) and Liceul Special pentru Deficienti de Vedere Cluj-Napoca (Romania). Its members (a university, a research institute, a software company, a teacher’s training centre, and a primary and a secondary school for the visually impaired) brought in different areas of expertise; meanwhile, the project also benefited from additional co-operation with several other organizations active in relevant fields.Four intellectual outputs were produced.1.An innovative inclusive educational framework for empowering spatial thinking in students with visual impairment was researched and developed.2.Educational spatial thinking components were designed, implemented and evaluated. They include educational scenarios which address a range of scientific fields, classes and curricula and utilize open learning tools.3.An innovative ICT toolkit, to assist the work of educators, has been designed, implemented and validated. Its first pillar is the web-based VISTE Community of users (platform), which allows teachers to share open educational resources developed in the project and cooperatively develop new ones. The second pillar is an augmented reality toolkit, which VI users can use to explore tactile maps with complementary audio information, to receive guidance to construct their own maps, or to explore tactile material in a quiz mode. The prototype was extended in order to also enable teachers of VI students to create their own audio-tactile material. Furthermore, a virtual reality toolkit has been designed and validated, which can be used as a street simulator in order to train VI students in orientation and mobility lessons.4.A guide of good practice and policy recommendation has been formulated, based on the experience gained during the project. Additionally, two joint staff training events provided teachers of VI students the opportunity to enhance their knowledge and skills and develop common resources, as well as to receive training on integrating augmented/virtual reality and 3D printing in their educational practice. Finally, 12 multiplier events and a variety of dissemination activities diffused project results to wider audiences. The project has won an award of excellence at the Edumanager.ro Gala forum in Romania. It has received a warm reception by the 175 school students (including 85 VI students) directly involved in its educational activities. It has equipped hundreds of education professionals with skills and motivation to serve the needs of their students using the VISTE approach, while the potential exists for further impact via the online community, the open access of intellectual outputs and the activities of teachers’ trainers. Project results have been communicated to the research community via publications and presentations at major conferences.

Digital technologies have an amazing potential in education and huge efforts and interest are being put into empowering teachers for better learning outcomes. The European Commission is accordingly strongly supporting, through policies and funding, digital learning in the European Education System. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exemplified the necessity of broadly accessible online educational resources.Unfortunately, disabled students are often left apart from this mainstream of research and innovation in Educational Technologies because the platforms and tools are not designed taking this group of users into account. As a result, students with disabilities suffer from a double disadvantage: not only cannot they benefit from the new teaching methodologies, but they cannot even access more traditional textbook-style digital learning material to support their self-studying. The overall goal of this project’s proposal is to significantly contribute to increase the number of online open educational resources accessible for disabled students, with an emphasis on visually impaired. It therefore stands up for a more inclusive e-learning.By developing further the results of the Erasmus Plus KA201 project INDIe, 2018-1-ES01-KA201-050924, http://indieproject.eu, an authoring tool will be delivered which implements a layer of generation of accessible content. It will therefore allow teachers and educators to easily produce rich online learning units which are accessible to students with visual impairment and possibly additional disabilities.Moreover, a number of accessible learning units on a range of topics and educational levels will be produced and published to the INDIeOpen repository of Open Educational Resources. These will be open to use, share, modify by any person interested. An online course on inclusive education for the professional development of teachers, staff or any person interested in the education of students with disabilities, will also be made available on INDIeOpen. Finally, the authoring tool INDIeAuthor itself will be adapted for a seamless experience for authors with visual impairment, who will be empowered to create their own online digital content.To achieve these goals, a consortium was built in a complementary perspective with partners with different profiles: a higher education institution with a strong technological know-how; organisations - a charity and specialised schools - with expertise and decades of experience in the education of students with visual impairment and additional disabilities; mainstream high schools with visually impaired students; a regional authority for education which in charge of attending students with educational needs in the Region of Murcia, and finally, a Greek association of teachers who share the passion to promote STEM subjects in education.The project aims to make a difference to the education of learners with disabilities allowing them to fully participate into digital learning, and helping them overcome some of the difficulties they have in education. This will be primarily achieved within the partnership but also on a regional, national and international level, taking advantage of multiplier events and of the networks our partners belong to. Likewise, we desire to improve awareness and training regarding inclusive education in the mainstream partner schools, and more generally in all schools we have contact with, on a regional, national and international level.All generated units along the project are published in INDIeOpen under a Creative Commons License, which means that any student in the world can use the units for his or her self-study, and any teacher in the world can link it from their Learning Management System as an Open Educational Resource. Our desire is to achieve a level of dissemination which would allow many students and teachers to be aware of these OER, contributing to a global education community.Finally, all the code of the intellectual outputs will be available in GitHub. It is our ambition that, as the community of authors and users grow, more programmers join the community and contribute to the code by sending pull requests and programming new modules and functionalities.Regarding the methodology, because of its strong technological component, the workflow will basically follow the Agile paradigm, so that functionalities are progressively delivered and tested, and the feedback of users and beta-testers are incorporated in the development process. The testing activities will therefore be organised by the partners in a systematic manner, and the users’ feedback be collected to guide further development.