Digital tools for teaching in Seville

Blog post by Anu Turkkila, Finnish teacher at Helsingin aikuisopiston peruskoulu

In July 2025, I took part in an Erasmus+ course for teachers in Seville, Spain, called Attention Please! Digital Tools and Techniques for Student Engagement. The course lasted six days and was organised by europass Teacher Academy. Our course took place at Ferlán Academia. Our teacher was Jonathan from Argentina, an active and really nice designer and IT expert with degrees in many different fields. Besides me, there were teachers from Italy, Portugal and Hungary.

Seville is a lovely city

Seville is a very beautiful city of 700,000 people in Andalusia, inland in southern Spain. Seville has a lot of interesting history, from ancient times through Arab rule to the present day. Its famous buildings include the Royal Alcázar of Seville, a royal palace built on the foundations of a Moorish fortress, the Plaza de España, built for the 1929 world exhibition, the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, and Las Setas, an example of stunning modern architecture. The Guadalquivir river, which flows through the city, also tells of its Arab history: its name comes from Arabic words meaning ‘great river’.

The writer standing in the sunny courtyard of a Spanish building with columns and bushes.

Colourful dishes on a table and a red drink in a tall glass.

During the course in July, it was as hot as +38 degrees in Seville. Hot weather suits me, and after the first ‘phew, it’s hot’ moments, I got used to the heat and really enjoyed my free time in the evenings: I walked over 80 km during the week, exploring the sights! The local food culture, small tapas dishes, also suited the hot weather, and I tasted many lovely flavours, for example cold salmorejo vegetable soup, chocos fritos (fried cuttlefish) and the dessert tocino del cielo. I experienced live flamenco at a dance show with the course group, and I also enjoyed flamenco singing at a night-time garden concert organised by the city.

A group of people standing in front of a Flamenco Andalusia sign. In front of the group there is a woman in a black Spanish dress and a red shawl, holding a fan.

Exploring a museum through a game, making a video from a story at the market, ideas from AI and other new things

On the course, we studied different digital teaching techniques that bring variety to lessons and motivate learners to study. Our teacher Jonathan showed us many different programmes and apps for creating tasks, games and presentations. We practised, for example, using Padlet, writing a blog, Kahoot games, a gymkhana game made with Forms for an art museum, using AI tools to create tasks, different image and music apps, storytelling, comic-style notes and making videos with Canva and PechaKucha, among others.

Museum visitors and old statues in a museum hall with orange walls.

We gave presentations to each other and gave encouraging and constructive feedback. It was also important to hear about the other teachers’ experiences. Even though we worked in very different schools (a nursery, early primary education, lower secondary school, vocational school, a special needs class and adult education), it was great to see how teachers all over Europe care about their learners in the same way, want to learn new things themselves and want to offer the best possible teaching. We got good tips for our work from each other.

People sitting at computers in a classroom.

I am a Finnish teacher, and for me, the Erasmus trip was also an important experience of what it is like to be a language learner. We worked in English on the course, and I noticed how the week helped my rusty English. By the end of the week, understanding and, above all, using English were much easier. I also speak some Spanish, and in my free time I used Spanish in shops, restaurants and at the sights. It is very healthy for a language teacher to sometimes experience how difficult it is to manage in a language you only know a little.

A building with a sign above the windows that says Ferlan Academia.

I am grateful that I could take part in the course. It gave me practical tools for my work and confirmed my belief that IT and digital gamification methods are important. On the course, I practised using some digital programmes and learnt about countless apps, many of which I will surely try out and start using. As a teacher of immigrants, it was also rewarding and educational for me to get to know another culture and its history and to have to use foreign languages myself.

Eight smiling people standing in front of the classroom board and holding course certificates. The ninth person in the middle of the group has no certificate.

Putting it into practice!

Above all, the course confirmed my view that technology must be used both in planning teaching and with learners. Whether the curriculum says so or not, technology must be part of all subjects. A teacher’s job is to prepare learners for the future, and technology and AI really are the future. A teacher has a duty to keep up to date and keep learning new things all the time. At the end of the course, we also agreed that apps keep developing and changing all the time. We cannot wait for the perfect programme. We just have to start using the apps as they change. The days when you took a computer driving licence and used the same programme for a decade are over. Now every teacher just has to open a programme and start trying things out bravely. Sometimes together with the learners!