Green Ideas 2015 workshop was organised and facilitated by GRNET on Saturday, September 19th, 2015 at the EA School Gardens in Pallini, Attica, in the context of the EDEN Open Classroom 2015 Athens Conference. The conference was organised by EA as part of the educational activities of ODS, GreeNET and Digi skills projects.

Green Ideas 2015 aimed at bringing together people from different backgrounds and for combining them to work collectively towards finding ways to facilitate active communities formed around green education. By mixing educators, learners, researchers and representatives of global initiatives focused on green education, their collective creativity is used as a generator of ideas and tangible action plans. The planned outcome of the workshop was a tangible plan to use innovative technological solutions offered by organisations like GRNET and Agro-Know and initiatives like LLP KA3 GLN and LLP Comenius GreeNET to support existing active communities like the school community of ODS consisting of 3374 schools and 8575 teachers.

The training followed a combination of the format of Green Ideas creativity events and Science Cafes. The invited experts, representing institutions and global initiatives focused on green education, had the opportunity to have an open discussion with educators and learners.
The workshop had a total of 26 participants divided in the following categories:

• 2 facilitators from AK and 1 from GRNET
• 2 invited experts
• 21 teachers  and researchers

The participants discussed around the presented solutions and identified a number of incentives and barriers to their adoption. Examples of such barriers can be found below:

• limited budget for equipment
• strict curriculum and limited time
• limited incentives to collaborate, even within the same schools

The support by parents, especially in the form of cooperation with the teachers for these additional activities, together with the use of the usual means used by teachers to communicate, such as social media (eg. facebook, twitter etc), would help them overcome such barriers.