GreenEdTech: Building a Digital Platform for Real-World Sustainability Education

The critical need for education to foster sustainability has long been recognized including recently in the Dublin Declaration which calls for global education to "bring about a world of social and climate justice… [and]... planetary sustainability." At the same time the education sector confronts a Janus-faced opportunity with AI and digital platforms as was discussed, for example, at UNESCO's 2024 Digital Learning Week. In Denmark a new project is seeking to leverage digital and AI capabilities to bring real-world sustainability problem-solving into the K-12 classroom, and do so at the needed scale. Green Transition of Education and educational TECHnology (GreenEdTech) is a collaborative project focused on integrating ESD into the Danish school system. In GreenEdTech students and teachers collaborate with green industries, public organisations, and NGOs in solving authentic sustainability problems as a means of developing key sustainability competencies in secondary school (7th - 10th). The collaboration takes place both physically and via the GreenEdTech digital learning platform which has been developed to support sustainability education grounded in the real world. Artificial intelligence tools are being leveraged to provide rapid, chat-based research support to students as well as to formulate and deliver formative assessment feedback and guidance to them.