Empowering pre- and in-service teachers to harness the potential of AI for designing creative and ethical digital education ecosystems

The EmpowerAId Academy supports the efforts of the European Education Area initiative, and specifically its focus on the Digital Education ensuring that all teachers and trainers have the confidence and competences to use technology effectively, critically and creatively. Although, the AI-driven technologies have started transforming the educational ecosystems across Europe, teachers and
teacher trainers are lagging behind in developing digital competences and AI literacy for managing the shift from human-centered education to human-AI interaction and integration of AI in Education (AIED). Towards that, the EmpowerAId Academy aims to build an innovative, multistakeholder and participatory reference network of European teacher education providers who join forces to codesign a comprehensive bottom-up training pathway. Innovative training programmes on AI ethics and creative teaching approaches will be developed both for teacher trainers and pre-service and in-service teachers adapted to each trainee group profile and training needs. These programmes will incorporate all forms of mobilities (physical, digital and blended) and support the
development of AI-related digital competences from AI literacy and data reasoning to critical thinking, bias identification and digital leadership skills. The EmpowerAId ITE and CPD programmes developed, along with a variety of
ultimodal training resources, will be tested and validated through structured blended piloting schemes in real educational settings, resulting into valuable data and insights that will enable the integration of AIED training in formalized and standardized ITE and CPD programmes. On top of that, synergies creation with EU and international projects and initiatives, as well as national and EU policy outreach activities will contribute to the ultimate goal of the project, which is to establish over time a European partnership between ITE and CPD providers
to catalyze future digital education ecosystems.