We start our “Meet Our Members” section with Cristina Casanova and Andrea Contino from MyDocumenta.

Could you tell us a little bit about your organisation’s mission?

MyDocumenta is an innovative Spanish SME focused on ICT in Education and Culture. The company was founded by the two of us, Cristina Casanova, with a background as a multimedia artist and in design and development of online tools, and Andrea Contino as a pedagogical expert and initiator of European projects. We develop educational solutions that enable creative and intuitive use of technology: a Life Long Learning eportfolio ecosystem, a multimedia web based platform, online interactivity and digital tools for collaborative creation.

Our goal is to democratize the use of ICT allowing every student and teacher to become true digital learners and professionals.

How does CRISS fit with this mission?

CRISS is very much in line with the company’s mission. MyDocumenta has been working in this direction for several years, towards the certification of digital competences through a platform that makes work simple, attractive and stimulating for students and teachers, and proposing contents that integrate ICT in the daily school activities. This is currently still a major challenge for many schools.

CRISS stimulates the use of ICT in education, in a student-focused approach, and will allow us to find efficient and attractive ways to evaluate the students’ outcomes.

What is your role in the CRISS project?

MyDocumenta is responsible for the design and development of the whole technological CRISS solution, with the collaboration of the rest of the technological partners: EXUS (which is also the Project Coordinator), E4S and DIGINEXT.

We will also collaborate in the implementation of the pilots, and have a major role in business, IPR and standardization activities.

In your opinion, which of the digital competences listed by the EU do you find most important? Why?

Communication and collaboration, and Digital content creation are of course the most attractive areas for our own environment, but the idea of CRISS is to certify digital competences as a whole, so there’s no competence more important than others.

How can we make students more engaged with ICT education?

Students are already very much engaged with ICT, so the use of ICT in education is a natural way of engagement. The way we use ICT in education should be close to their reality. So, it should allow us to integrate the multimedia they already use, and we should make the technology attractive, easy-to-use and with great design. And integrate ICT in the global learning program, instead of considering it as a separate subject.

What is the most exciting aspect of taking part in CRISS for you and your organisation?

CRISS gives us the opportunity to bring to a next level something that we’ve been working on for some time, something very innovative in a great consortium with experts from the academic, technological and governmental sectors. It is a very ambitious project that will develop, test and validate something completely new in Europe, and for which there is an enormous demand. It’s great to be part of this.