EU Green Tour: From Learning Together to Sharing Knowledge Locally
What happens when participants return home from an international training and become trainers themselves?
This was the next step in the Erasmus+ EU Green Tour project. Following the joint training held in Athens, project participants from Italy, Sweden, Greece and Ukraine brought the knowledge and practical skills gained during the international meeting back to their own countries and communities.
Through a series of cascade training activities for teachers and students, the project continued to connect sustainability education with digital journalism, media literacy and practical learning.
From international training to local learning
The cascade activities gave educators and students an opportunity to explore how digital green journalism can be used to communicate about sustainability, local communities, environmental challenges and cultural heritage.
The training combined theoretical knowledge with practical exercises. Participants learned how to develop an article from an idea to a finished publication, how to structure journalistic content and how to create clear and engaging headlines.
Particular attention was given to the visual dimension of digital journalism. Participants explored the principles of photojournalism, learned how to take and process photographs for journalistic purposes and discussed how images can contribute to telling a story.
The programme also introduced practical skills for video journalism. Participants learned the basics of shooting video for journalistic content and explored how to conduct and record video interviews. These activities helped them understand how different digital formats can be combined to communicate a story effectively.
Learning to verify before publishing
Digital journalism also requires the ability to distinguish reliable information from misleading or manipulated content. For this reason, fake news checking was an important part of the cascade training.
Participants learned practical approaches to checking information and photographs before using them in journalistic materials. The training highlighted the importance of verification, source awareness and responsible communication in the digital environment.
Ethics and responsibility in journalism were also discussed throughout the activities. Participants considered questions related to accuracy, responsible use of information and images, respect for people appearing in journalistic content and the responsibility that comes with publishing information online.
Building skills for the EU Green Tour e-Magazine
Another important element of the training was the presentation of the EU Green Tour e-Magazine platform. Participants were introduced to how the platform works and how their future journalistic materials can become part of the project’s international online publication.
The practical skills developed during the cascade activities — crafting an article, creating headlines, photojournalism, shooting videos for journalism, conducting video interviews and checking information for fake news — provide students with tools they can use to create their own digital stories.
The cascade training therefore became more than a transfer of knowledge. It created an opportunity for teachers and students to move from learning about digital journalism to actually practising it.
By bringing the experience from Athens into local educational contexts, EU Green Tour continues to build a shared learning process across Europe — connecting educators, students, sustainability and digital storytelling.
The next stories are now being created by the young people themselves.
