Nowadays, empowerment in the use of online educational processes is crucial. The current literature shows that new technologies can be relevant in social rehabilitation programs since they reduce mobility and allow personalized rehabilitative paths. Nevertheless, the use of new technologies requires specific and structured competences. Accordingly, the DSI project's principal objective was the definition of a basic portfolio for digital social innovation competences at a European level specifically designed for students in social educator study programs, employed/unemployed social educators, and social volunteers. All partners already developed educational programs addressed to social educators and used digital resources in their educational activity with vulnerable social groups.Accordingly, partners shared their competences in digital-based educational programs such as competences for children with behavioral disturbances, online social coaching, social telerehabilitation of vulnerable social groups, etc., in order to implement the basic portfolio for digital social innovation competences. For this purpose, they selected, analyzed, and commented on the best practices and methodologies about using digital technologies in designing, implementing, and running social innovation solutions. Social educators have been involved in all the project activities through meetings, seminars, and online discussions. A short term learning event has been organized involving educators and experts. In synthesis, the project reached the following objectives: • exchanging good practices between organizations active in social education and social innovation • increasing the competencies of social educators • defining a basic portfolio of competences for social educators and social volunteers in digital social innovation practices at a European level • creating a comprehensive (and commented) list of topics and practices essential for digital social innovation initiatives/activities • creating a network active in digital social innovation The main addressed needs were: • enhancing social inclusion improving professional competences of social educators and social volunteers in a topical sector such as digital social innovation and the use of technology for social rehabilitation practices; • educators empowerment in the use of online educational processes. Project target groups Social educators, more precisely social educator students and social educators engaged in volunteer activities or employed in social services institutions/organizations, were the DSI project's main target group. DSI also involved other target groups: - Vulnerable social groups - Social services - Educational institutions

BACKGROUNDDue to the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in Europe opted to switch to online remote courses with a view to keeping their students and teaching staff safe during the pandemic emergency.The consequences have been tragic for students and kids with special needs.Indeed, educational institutions were not prepared for supporting them at distance.As a consequence, parents of children with special needs found themselves in a new burdensome situation, becoming responsible for continuing their children's education at home.PROJECT OBJECTIVESThe purpose of the DiLASD project is to provide social educators and social workers with competence in assisting students and kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their families remotely.ASD encompasses a group of lifelong disabilities that affect people’s ability to communicate and understand social cues. An individual with ASD has difficulties in recognizing body language, making eye contact, and understanding other people’s emotions.The main objective of the project is the active learning of individuals with ASD, according to their personals abilities, through the use of digital technology. Remote teaching-learning and online assistance will decrease their marginalization; improving their self-independence and well-being in life.NEEDSThe DiLASD project is motivated by the analysis that partners conducted during the closure of educational institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the main needs that emerged from their analysis has been the necessity to professionalize the interventions of social educators and social workers in designing and running educational activities for students and kids with ASD remotely.TARGET GROUPSThe primary target groups are:•Social educators and social workers (and social volunteers).•Students and kids with ASD.The other target groups are:•Families of students and kids with ASD. •Social Services.•Organizations/institutions engaged in Special Education NeedsPARTNERSThe DiLASD project involves five partners from five European countries (Poland, Italy, Greece, Latvia, Cyprus) that have a long experience in the ASD scope and experimented with ERT in their countries during the schools’ closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They decided to put together their theoretical and practical experience to realize a training package to support students and kids with ASD remotely. PROJECT ACTIVITIES The main project activities include:•An educational pack for social educators/social workers to train them to support remotely students and kids with ASD as well as their parents.•Laboratories in which students and kids with ASD will experiment with remote learning, the use of software applications, and programmable toy robots (PTRs).•A virtual community where social educators, social workers, and parents can find educational materials as well as collect and share their experiences.•An educational multimedia book on online social communication and autism.The training course will be held in a virtual classroom. Social educators and social workers will be provided with digital skills and competence to implement remote teaching-learning activities for students and kids with ASD as well as assist them at distance.LEARNING STRATEGYThe DiLASD project will adopt an advanced learning strategy:•The training course will be based on an online adaptable learning approach and the use of structured learning units to create personalized learning paths in an online environment.•Online parent-training to train parents of students and kids with ASD to support the remote teaching-learning of their children.•Online laboratories involving students and kids with ASD individually and in groups.POTENTIAL LONG TERM BENEFITSIn Europe, the incidence of diagnosed ASD in young people appears to be in a range of 6 to 20 per 1000. In recent decades the number of people diagnosed with ASD has increased significantly.The main potential benefits of the DiLASD project are:• promoting practices of remote teaching-learning and remote assistance for students and kids with ASD;• Improving the competence of social educators/social workers/social volunteers;• Integrating topical teaching-learning methodologies such as online participatory learning, web social learning, online peer learning, and web-based self-learning practices;• Encouraging educational institutions to use online technology in Special Education Needs.finally, the potential longer-term benefits are also successful professional, independent life of future adults with ASD; their relative safety on the labor market and involvement in work mainly in the service sector; the revival of forgotten jobs to the provision of which adults with ASD may strongly contribute.

"<< Background >>There is a great problem with lack of a proper social enterpreneurship education. This field of study, and most importantly practice, is still in early stages of development in our country. Through cooperation and transnational practice exchange we plan to broaden our view of the spectrum of problems in regard of this issue. Basic needs are clear - educating tutors participating in a project, sharing experience and planning together on creating next projects of a much bigger scope.We are applying for this project because we want to create a professional consortium that will prepare high-level training concepts for people who want to set up a social economy entity and deal in practice with social entrepreneurship. We want to prepare a specific guide. We believe that the social economy is a good form of combating social exclusion. Among our partners we have two social cooperatives - Polish and Italian, which gives a practical aspect to our deliberations and our project work.We have noticed that often young entrepreneurs are left alone with their ideas and do not have anyone to help, assist, advise them. Result of our project aims to help adult people develop an entrepreneurship mind-set in the field of VERTICAL FARMING by tackling climate change and unemployment. While dealing with these issues, we aims to foster the use of ICT and wishes to encourage the use of these tools applied to this specific target group, to improve the quality of learning, provide access to resources and services online, while at the same time providing feedback on progress and create the conditions for increasing and improving young people’ entrepreneurial skills and empower them to become more notorious in labour market or to goforward with their business idea in urban agriculture business field. One of our result is keen to develop crowdsourcing platform.<< Objectives >>Our main objective in this project is to share experiences, knowledge and acquire useful competences for the future follow-up programs. One of the prospect projects we plan to carry-out is to create an extensive educational program on how to build a social collective for the parties involved. The complexity of this project requires us to become not only practitioners but also to broaden our perspectives on a whole array of subjects around social enterpreneurship. Such enterprise requires us to become real experts in this field and in order to coordinate our future steps accordingly we need to share good practices, find most common and also less common faults in the topic of social enterpreneurship.<< Implementation >>We plan to foremostly create a close relationships with our new partners in this project. This is also very important to tighten the bonds with our partners from projects of the past. The relationships within partners and stakeholders is something almost unvalueable. It helps creating great projects in the future, provides opportunities for constant growth and development. Transnational cooperation is something that brings people from different cultures to share ideas, exchange thoughts and experiences and create new opportunities from beneficiaries of our projects.Taking all this in consideration our main activities that we focus on implementing in this stage is to create an environment for the exchange of aquired knowledge through meetings in every organisations' headquarters.<< Results >>All the organizations of this consortium deal with similar social issues and problems, including adult education, combating social exclusion, new technologies, and the social economy and entrepreneurship. They are united by solving social problems and have common goals. That is why the SocEnter project was created. Ecoinstituto implemented EU projects in the field of social economy. They also conducted research on social entrepreneurship. Ecoinstituto also implemented EU projects related to new technologies. The Zofia Zamenhof Foundation has been implementing a project on new technologies and social exclusion for NCBiR under the POWER program for a year; Ecoinstituto and the Zofia Zamenhof Foundation are currently jointly implementing one Erasmus Plus project ""Marketing skills in social media for young people with disabilities"". The other partners also have many years of experience in innovative training practices as well as in adult education. This project was created as a result of: - research on social innovations and social coaching conducted by the Zofia Zamenhof Foundation as part of previously implemented projects,- socio-economic research conducted by Ecoinstituto in recent years, - extensive practical experience of other partners in adult education and social economy,- Social Cooperative of Legal Persons ""Centrum Usług Środowiskowych"" Poland and the social enterprise Centro Solidarietà Giovani ""Giovanni Micesio"" from Italy. The main complexity of the project is concerning the educational approach which aims at innovative methods of learning and development through participation in meetings and training, social media as well as informal learning in an online environment. In fact, there are many differences between full-time and online learning in adult education, and research shows that characteristics such as self-discipline, internal motivation, self-reflection, self-esteem, but also external evaluation and exchange of experiences are important in learning. Based on the above conclusions, our project aims to experiment with a new learning method based on innovative online learning, later confronted during meetings and exchange of experiences. The main difference between the training projects proposed in the project is the learning approach based on an innovative informal learning program based on the extensive experience of the partners. Another particularly important aspect concerns the project's target group consisting of low-skilled and unskilled adults from small and medium-sized towns and villages. Simply put, the project addresses the following innovative issues: - Developing an approach to support non-formal adult learning in innovative online learning; - The impact of virtual relationships and contacts on education and exchange of experiences; - Verifying how informal learning can improve social capital and what factors can improve learning in an online learning environment; - Opportunities for the development of the economy and social entrepreneurship through the exchange of international experiences; - Experimenting with methods for evaluating informal learning programs. - Creation and development of your own training program based on the blended learning method. - Development of social entrepreneurship as a result of deepening the educational process in the field of practical social economy.All this is done so that the team exchanged experiences and created the concept of a broad project on how to create and conduct a social cooperative. Participants themselves will be able to create similar organizations to help people who are excluded from society. It helps people who are excluded from society in the labour market and makes them work more consciously with such people."

Often, parents of children with special needs choose not to venture anywhere. They frequently avoid travels since they are unaware of how to get the accommodations they need during the journey. On the other hand, companies that offer travel services, especially micro-companies, don’t know the needs of families with children with special needs.The principal objective of the EliSE project is supporting parents of children with behavioral disturbs realizing an educational parent-training module for “fair traveling” in European countries and an educational toolkit. Accordingly, the primary target group of this project is represented by social educators that will be trained on how to train parents of children with behavioral disturbs (parent-training).For this purpose, our project aims at improving the competence of educators in the field of special education as well as to teach them on the use of parent-training techniques.The other target groups involved in the EliSE project are the families of children with special needs, parents' associations, social services, NGOs involved in special need education, and companies that deliver travel services.Target groups’ representatives are involved in the project’s activities through training activities, meetings, seminars, and online discussions. One short-term learning event will be organized involving selected persons from the target groups (social educators and parents) and experts.The Consortium is formed of six partners from six different countries, Latvia, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey.The EliSE project will provide partners with the opportunity to share investigations conducted separately in the field of special need education as well as to confront ideas, practices, and methods in the sector of social integration. Thanks to this project, they will increase their capacity to operate at a transnational level.This project foresees four IOs:1. IO1: Model representing the various aspects which characterize travels of families with children affected by behavioral disturbs (months 1-6)2. IO2: Online collaborative learning infrastructure (months 3-11)3. IO3: Blended learning module for educators: “Supporting families with children affected by behavioral disturbs” •Design of the module (months 6-8) •Implementation of the module (months 7-11) •Pilots (month 12-18)4. IO4: Toolkit for Fair Traveling and Policy recommendations (months 17-24)The project's impact includes:•more active participation in society (social educators, parents, children, and stakeholders);•improved competences, linked to professional profiles (social educators); •better understanding of practices in education and training (educational institutions);•more strategic and integrated use of ICTs and open educational resources (OER) in education and training (for educators, parents, and educational institutions); •reinforced interaction between practice, research, and policy (educators, Parents’ Associations, Policymakers, Travel services companies).Finally, our project can contribute to support migration of families with children with special needs offering them information on childcare inclusive settlements and guidance.

The ESEC project has provided social educators with the competences needed for designing and running parent training courses in an online environment. It realized an innovative parent training program for parents of children with behavioral disabilities in order to extend and develop the current competence and skills of both social educators and support teachers. The importance of training parents is widely emphasized by researchers and practitioners. Parents of children with autism or Down Syndrome have been successfully taught to improve their parent-childe relationship, increase communication skills, and decrease inappropriate, so called, behaviors. It has been demonstrated that parents of children with ASD are consequently found to have elevated levels of parenting related stress and psychological distress. Despite the numerous examples and variety of parent training courses, evidence-based guidelines for designing, implementing and running online parent training programs for parents of children with behavioral disabilities are not available. Moreover, parent training techniques are not widely studied by students in social pedagogy and social worker study programs. ESEC project pursues two main objectives, inclusive education and social educators professionalization. The project has realized an innovative parent training program for parents of children with behavioral disabilities in order to extend and develop the current competence and skills of both social educators and learning support teachers. It is motivated by a research conducted by JKPU and Ecoistituto on social innovation and social coaching in 2015 -2016 and on recent analysis conducted by JKPU and Udine University in 2017 on the association of parents of children with behavioral disabilities. The experience of Include and RTA on inclusive education confirmed the importance of parent training practices. On the basis of JKPU and Udine analysis emerged that the use of new technologies can be relevant in parent training educational programs since they can reduce mobility problems and offer the opportunity for personalized learning paths as authoritative sources and possibility of misunderstanding, biased information, etc. The participants in ESEC project were Consortium Partners, social educators and support teachers, who were the primary target group of the project. The parents of children with behavioral disabilities also took part in it as well as students in social educators' and social workers' study programs and stakeholders. Social educators and support teachers were involved mainly in learning activity, training program and outputs evaluation. The ESEC project main results are realization of evidence-based guidelines for designing and implementing and running a 2.0 educational parent training program that tackles all issues, theoretical and practical, related to parent training practices and includes a training course for parents of children with behavioral disabilities. The training course is an application of the evidence-based guidelines since the ESEC project foresees that learners can use the guidelines to design, implement and run a parent training course for a specific group of parents, under the supervision of experts (special pedagogues, social pedagogues, psychologists, social anthropologists, and expert in social media). This program strengthens the links between professional education and research and social development as well as practical use of acquired knowledge. ESEC provides the notions required for designing and running parent-training courses in an online environment and it demonstrates its effectiveness. The ESEC training approach focuses on teaching techniques, as well as on indirect and direct teaching strategies and on relational practices. Indirect teaching strategies are aimed to increase social responsiveness of parents. The ESEC consortium was formed of 5 partners whos complementary expertise in teaching and learning benefited for the project. These were 2 HE institutions, 1 foundation, and 2 NGOs. This strategy was motivated by realization and demonstration the effectiveness of a theoretical/methodological framework for parent-training at European level. Secondly, by wish to create a common understanding on special education at a European level thanks to collaboration of the Consortium partners exploiting/integrating their competence matured in non-funded researches and thirdly by reinforcing social inclusion and professional use of digital technology - that is a crucial European priority and the Covid 19 pandemic has proved that. The project transnationality is the condition for the transferability of the project results in other countries. Projects outcomes are realized in English but they are being translated into national languages. Impact of the project is very wide because the social education shows social and economic relevance in EU courtiers and this project improves both competences and skills.