This study investigates the role played by parents as mediators of young children's access and engagement with digital technologies. In Belgium, Germany, Latvia and Portugal, qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 families in each country, including one child between 6 and 7 years old. Our findings show that parents of young children mainly play the role of 'gatekeepers' when it comes to facilitating and constraining access to and use of digital technologies. Parents' perceptions of the efficacy of digital technologies as responsible entertainment and as educational tools influence the technologies available at home and

In the spring of 2020, when the entire education system worldwide switched to distance learning, parents became key learning agents, helping students to understand how to continue learning, how to use digital solutions and how to support students in this process. This article summarizes parents’ views on the distance learning process and the challenges they faced. This is part of a larger study carried out within the project “Life with COVID-19: Evaluation of the overcoming coronavirus crisis in Latvia and recommendations for social resilience in the future” (CoLife), which was launched in Latvia in the summer of 2020 and analyzed what digital learning tools schools can use to support students in their learning. Parents’ views on 738 school-age children (313 responses about 1st–4th graders; 362 responses for 5th–9th graders and 63 responses for 10th–12th graders) were obtained, and the main conclusions were that after parents became learning agents, they would have liked more support from educators to understand how to support their children in the learning process. Parents would also have liked schools to be interested in how their children are doing and whether everything necessary is available. Overall, it can be concluded that in this crisis, parents tried to support their children, and in most cases, it was the mothers of the students who provided this support, but it was primarily based on the need to use digital technologies, which means that children whose parents do not use digital technologies may be more exposed to the danger of falling into a risk group with larger educational gaps.

Competence-based education has been in the spotlight for several years, and it is a topical issue in the European Union as well as marking the reform of the Latvian education system. The Council of the EU considers entrepreneurial competence to be one of the key competences for lifelong learning, and Latvia’s school reforms require teachers to create a study process where students develop entrepreneurial competence. This publication presents research on the self-assessed entrepreneurial competence of teacher education students to find out whether there is any correlation between their assessment of entrepreneurial competence and their readiness/ability to develop this competence in their students, as well as which methods/activities they see as suitable to do so in the classroom and the remote study process. An online survey using the QuestionPro platform was used to collect the data. The questionnaire was fully completed by 157 pedagogy students from various higher education institutions, and it consisted of four question blocks: demographic and socio-cultural questions, entrepreneurial competence, digital competence, and open-ended questions. The data provided by the questionnaire developed for this research showed that students’ self-assessed entrepreneurial competence in a remote study process rated their digital competences highest, followed by their entrepreneurial competences. The results indicate that students are sufficiently prepared to be able to further develop their entrepreneurial competence in the remote study process. From the data, it can be concluded that higher education needs to focus on the development of entrepreneurial competence and should also supplement the methodological knowledge of students to improve their readiness to teach entrepreneurial competences to others. It should also be noted that there is a strong correlation between students’ entrepreneurial competence and their readiness to teach entrepreneurial competences to others. An online survey using the QuestionPro platform was used to collect the data. The questionnaire was fully completed by 157 pedagogy students from various higher education institutions, and it consisted of four question blocks: demographic and socio-cultural questions, entrepreneurial competence, digital competence, and open-ended questions.

<p><em>Health literacy and health education are reciprocally connected concepts in modern scientific discourse. Educational institutions, especially schools, are defined as one of the main arenas for the development and promotion of the child’s health literacy. Thus, health literacy, conceptualized as the outcome of school learning, becomes the aim of school health education. As concept of health literacy becomes more complicated its attainment requires more advanced and specific teaching methods, which, in its turn, demands transformations in teacher education and teachers’ professional development as well as to perceive the child as an active participant in the teaching/learning process. Good health literacy leads to the child empowerment. </em></p><p> </p>

2020 brought the world huge challenges in almost every field when the new COVID-19 virus began to spread rapidly. Digitalization made it possible to use innovative solutions to ensure access to various services, to continue working, and to learn from a distance, but it made the situation different from the one we all were familiar with and raised questions on how to ensure qualitative education for all. The situation where the whole world had to move education to the digital environment at the same time posed many challenges for teachers, students, and parents. The aim of the present research was to find out how the COVID-19 crisis contributed to the digital transformation of education. Several complementary research methods were used to obtain results, one of which was used to analyze the functionality and degree of interactivity of learning platforms, providing an educational perspective to this research. The second method was focus group discussions with experts in technology-enhanced learning to gather ideas for overcoming the crisis and to outline future directions for the digital transformation of education in the context of remote learning. The third method was a survey of teachers who work with students of compulsory education. This material provides an overview of methods used by the WP6 working group “Education System Transformation: Consequences of the COVID-19 Crisis and Possible Solutions” (VPP-COVID-2020/1-0013), part of the National Research Program project.