“Remote Control – Digital Youth Work: Virtual facilitators” was the second part of the training course “Remote Control – Digital Youth Work” that took place in Trikala riverside small town in Greece. The second part was implemented from the 25th of February until the 7th of March 2022. This project has eight partner countries and organizations that are coming from North Macedonia, Greece, Croatia, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, Romania and Portugal.
Living in the COVID-19 era gave us the need to be a part of this kind of project, many NGOs struggled in order to keep their impact and work present in the newly created online world. Many people didn’t have the knowledge of how to use platforms for online events and meetings so the need for further education in this topic was born.
As participants of the first mobility, we were given the chance to participate in the second mobility as well. This project was mainly focused on learning different platforms and tools we can implement in order to be able to host, prepare and organise virtual workshops, seminars, engaging activities and how to use social media to promote our activities.
After everyone safely arrived in Trikala we had a warm “Welcome evening” in the traditional taverna where we had a chance to talk to the rest of our beautiful participants and get to know each other while sipping on some homemade wine and enjoying Greek food.
On the second day we got the chance to introduce ourselves through creative icebreakers, we set the contributions, expectations and fears and created a safe space for future development and team building.
Mainly during this amazing training we learned about: Zoom, WebEx, Moodle, Microsoft Teams, Google Meets, Discord and different tools that can be added in our meetings as an extension like: Kahoot, Sli.do, Forms, Trello and Slack.
We also created our own workshops using the platforms we created workshops about: Art History, Poetry, Femicide vs Androcide, and Recycling. All of the workshops that we prepared were done online and we experienced how it is to be a facilitator online, how to make the workshop entertaining and keep the attention of the audience present, also we developed our problem-solving abilities in the times when we faced technical difficulties. We had to act quick.
As for sharing our cultures and traditions we had two intercultural nights where each country presented their foods, drinks, stereotypes, famous natural exhibits etc. Our Macedonian team brought homemade rakija, ajvar and tasty white cheese together with some national sweets.
We are so grateful that we had this opportunity to have a glance inside the world of facilitators, develop the digital competencies that will bring us future prospects, further event planning and in general engage with our audience online as youth workers.
You can learn more about the project, its activities, results, dissemination activities and used materials on the project website: https://remotecontrolbycet.wordpress.com/
