An AI course in Athens

Blog post by Olli Lukkari, special needs teacher at Helsingin aikuisopiston peruskoulu

From 16 to 21 June, I took part in an artificial intelligence training course in Athens that lasted about a week. The other participants were teachers and a school psychologist from Latvia, Estonia and Italy. I noticed that AI was not quite as familiar to the other teachers as it was to me, but luckily I also learnt new things on the course.

Our trainer was a Greek teacher. In addition to telling us about AI and discussing it with us, he also told us about life and work in Greece: the starting salary of a new primary school teacher in Greece is €900 a month, with a little over 20 teaching hours a week. In Finland, the salary would be about €2,500–3,000 for about the same number of teaching hours. For comparison, according to our teacher, the rent for a studio flat in Athens starts at €500, which is not a small amount when the minimum wage in the country is €750. In Helsinki, studio flats start at about €600. Our teacher told us that almost all teachers in basic education also teach private students in the afternoons and evenings in addition to their actual job.

During the course, we visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where, among other things, I saw the first skeleton of my life. It was over 2,000 years old! We also visited the National Library of Greece, which is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Stavros Niarchos was a Greek billionaire and shipowner who made a huge fortune transporting oil. He used his money, among other things, to set up the foundation that carries his name.

Learning about AI

On the course, I learnt a lot about different AI solutions that support teaching: how different AI platforms can be used to come up with ideas and create different content, and above all to develop critical literacy.

We learnt how Google NotebookLM can turn study material into podcasts, where hosts talk about and discuss the material. With NotebookLM, you could also create mind maps on almost any topic. We tried creating our own materials with Diffit, but after my first excitement, it turned out not to be as handy as I had thought. The teacher went through different chat-based tools like ChatGPT, although we did not have much time to try them (Google AI Studio, Perplexity and Gemini). During the course, we also talked about special needs teaching and the philosophies and attitudes related to it.

We had lessons on five days of the week, and the sixth day was for exploring the city on our own.

Green travel

I chose so-called green travel, which means that I travelled mainly overland. On the way there, I flew from Helsinki to Warsaw in Poland, and from there I travelled by bus and train about 2,000 kilometres on roads and railways all the way to Athens. On the way back, I travelled the whole way, about 3,000 kilometres, by bus to Tallinn, and from there I took the ferry to Helsinki. From Tirana in Albania to Tallinn in Estonia took about 60 hours! Sitting on buses, especially sleeping on night buses, was quite hard on the body, but on the other hand I read a lot of books and saw amazing landscapes on the bus journeys! Still, I would not easily recommend this kind of experience to others. My original plan was to travel back slowly through Europe and stay in different countries in the Balkans and the Baltics, but because of circumstances that had nothing to do with the training, I had to travel back quickly.

My training was part of the EU’s Erasmus+ programme, so I got funding for the trip, which covered my quite modest travel and accommodation costs. I often stayed in hostels in shared rooms with other travellers.

Community

In addition to technical skills, the most important thing the course gave me was a sense of community. Discussions with the Latvian, Estonian and Italian participants opened up new perspectives on teaching and life. Several of the other participants worked at a centre for people with visual impairments, so their everyday work was quite different from mine with adult immigrant students. Their schools had sensory rooms, toys suitable for blind people and tactile learning materials that are easy to explore by touch.

My Italian colleague told me that the students in their school learn, among other things, how to make pizza. This made me smile a little, because it sounded like such a stereotypical Italian thing. The course and teaching were in English. For some participants, speaking and understanding English was easy, for others a little more difficult, but despite everything, the course went very well.

Summary

Overall, the trip and the course left a very positive impression. However, I do not think that a course like this is necessary for teachers and others who want to learn to use AI in their work. There are lots of free videos on YouTube (for example, the YouTuber Matt Wolfe follows AI news and apps for a living, and he is just one of many). By searching for and watching them, anyone can learn to use free AI tools at home, often even faster than by taking courses.