The project consortium meeting took place in Dublin, Ireland. This was our last partner meeting before the final meeting and conference in Luxembourg, in January 2024.

Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic at the moment – important not only as an innovative approach to education, but also as a major game-changer in terms of how, who, whom and when. Therefore, we started the meeting with a simposium on AI in education.

• A representative from Microsoft Ireland gave an interesting insight into the development of Artificial Intelligence over the last decades, with a special focus on the ‘elephant in the room’: large language models (ChatGPT and Bing).
• Afterwards, our colleague from H2 Learning, John Hurley, focused on the topic of ethics and AI and presented the European Commission’s ethical guidelines for AI.
• Martin Farrows from Soapbox Labs introduced himself and talked about personalisation and how AI can help with literacy.
• The ‘Irish Teacher Perspective’ segment was a really valuable boost and insight. Irish teachers presented their examples, experiences, current and future use, benefits and challenges of AI tools in the classroom.

The symposium closed with a general panel discussion, oppening the floor to questions, comments and challenging. Some keynotes from the panelists:

• To move forward, we must thoroughly examine our curriculum and determine its relevance to the present. This requires a combination of approaches that include both a bottom-up and top-down perspective. We must have great confidence in our teachers and recognize their critical role in education.
• Our focus must shift from pure content to skill development. We should emphasize the importance of critical thinking, critical analysis skills, and data literacy – understanding how data is processed.
• Now is not the time to be frugal; we need to invest significant resources in education and support our teachers. The momentum of change is accelerating rapidly, and we cannot afford to lag behind. It is imperative that we do things differently, because the old ways may no longer be sufficient. We must adapt and evolve our thinking to meet the challenges of the future.

Diedre Butler, DCU

Teachers are the gate keepers of our next generation and future society.

During the meeting we had productive sessions discussing the different work packages. In WP1 (experiments) and WP2 (training) the discussions were constructive and focused on moving forward.

The following day we held an introductory workshop for the dissemination and exploitation work package. We assessed the current situation, reviewed the implemented results and analyzed the achieved indicators. The main focus of the discussion was on the necessary steps to achieve our goals.

We also gained valuable insights into the partial results of the evaluation (WP3) and participated in a short workshop to discuss the results.

On the last day of the meeting, our main focus was on the work package responsible for monitoring the quality of project implementation. We deliberated on the identification of potential critical issues and risks and elaborated strategies and activities to mitigate them effectively.

In addition, our partners reported on their experiences and approaches to training in their respective countries and presented the content covered.