<< Background >>The DIGITECH project is about the Development of dIGItal and information TECHnological competences by teachers and takes place in the context of the COVID-19 crisis with the climate crisis and the energy transition in the background. This Erasmus+ project focuses on the digital skills that school teachers from both primary and secondary schools need for digital teaching during and after the COVID-crisis. Based on experience, work needs to be done especially on the way of teachers in coping with digital learning environments. Hence, our main goal with the DIGITECH project is to decrease and ultimately take away the backlog of current teachers in using digital skills in teaching.The time of having a separate IT department has passed. If you want to work with digital skills, you have to do this in every terrain. No matter if you teach mathematics, chemistry, languages, or any other subject, we have to work on the digital skills of both teachers and students in all areas. In this project, we are going to work on the improvement of digital skills in the area of sustainability and energy transition. We firstly focus on teachers and then think of how we can train and equip them to teach their students the digital skills that they need.<< Objectives >>This project aims to train teachers to work with digital tools after the pandemic, building further on skills and needs developed during the pandemic. We are going to test and improve the developed toolkits in several existing educational programmes on sustainability, with a focus on the Energy Challenges programme.We will firstly focus on facilitating discussions and evaluations of teacher’s experiences with using digital tools in the classroom. We will use our lessons learned to improve and strengthen digital educational tools, make them more sustainable, future-proof, and pandemic-proof. We will look at how the tools are embedded in the participating schools and which capacity and skills are needed to further integrate them. Secondly, we are investigating how we can improve the content of our developed toolbox and develop a training programme. To do this, we are testing it in multiple schools executing different existing educational programmes from our international project partners. Tknika, the center promoted by the Deputy Ministry of Vocational Education and Training of the Education Department of the Basque Government, will be a central supporting partner in this. Tknika is modeled after some of the world’s most advanced vocational training centers.<< Implementation >>The duration of the project will be two years. Through digital platforms and regular partner meetings, we will facilitate the exchange of knowledge and co-creation of digital teaching methods. Through action-based research methods, we will explore together with teachers, students and actors from outside the classroom how digital tools can improve education and also how these tools serve to connect students to the energy transition in the real world. It will be suitable for Industry and Digitalization 4.0. The tools will be collected within one toolbox that builds digital skills capacity and will be supplemented by the local context. It serves in such a way that students together with teachers can come up with creative solutions to solve the climate crisis with the use of digital tools and skills and subsequently initiate action and mobilize actors around them through digital platforms. The international programme of Energy Challenges '2IMPRESZ' will be introduced, as a pilot for digitalization in primary and secondary education. During the project, there will be three physical two-day gatherings (if possible) in a central place that can be reached by train. Traveling by train contributes to the image of a Green Recovery after COVID-19, and stimulates the idea that flying is not necessary anymore in a digital era. In these two-day gatherings, teachers’ experiences with using digital tools during the COVID-19 pandemic will be evaluated and discussed. We will use a design-thinking-inspired method of diverging and converging problems to come up with solutions. We will co-create digital tools and methods that help to teach in an efficient and more sustainable way.<< Results >>In the project, teachers will have learned how to adapt their teaching to the needs of Industry and Digitalization 4.0, with lessons learned of the COVID-19 crisis on the background. There will be optimal use of the digital tools available. The teachers of the sustainability education programmes from our international partners will have been trained to use digital tools to keep their students involved and enthusiastic, and to stimulate creativity in new, innovative ways. Also, the content of the developed toolbox will have been improved to optimally stimulate the digital skills of both teachers and students. The lessons learned on how to foster digital skills through sustainability education and a training programme for capacity building will be disseminated in the four participating EU member states. By integrating our findings into 2IMPRESZ and other existing educational programmes operating in both primary and secondary schools, the results of this project will remain and evolve in the future.