On the 6th of October KLÕPS attended the FEAPDA council meeting for the first time as a member of the organisation. Besides Estonia, member organisations from Great Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and Macedonia were also present at the meeting. The meeting was busy and fruitful, it was inspiring to meet our colleagues from other parts of Europe.

The next meeting will take place in September 2019 in Macedonia, where also the next FEAPDA congress will be held.

Looking forward to new meetings and cooperation.

A moment from the council meeting

We are happy to announce, that our work on the Spreadthesign dictionary (https://www.spreadthesign.com/) will keep on going, as our application for an Erasmus+ project has been approved. The new feature in the dictionary will be the interactive 360° pictures, which will make sign language learning much more exciting and handy.

Our team has been working with Spreadthesign dictionary since 2011, when Estonia joined the project, KLÕPS has been a partner in the project since 2015.

The new year started out for us with positive and long awaited news – our association became a member of FEAPDA, The European Federation of Associations of Teachers of the Deaf.

The negotiations for joining FEAPEDA began already last autumn, but at that time the association was in the middle of reorganizing their membership policy and it was not clear yet if or on what conditions KLÕPS could become a member. At the end of last year though it was clear, that our organisation is welcome to join FEAPEDA and so we did (since January 2018).

FEAPDA is an all-European associations of Teachers of the Deaf, founded in 1969. The aim of FEAPDA is to represent and support Teachers of the Deaf by sharing good practice principally through organising a congress hosted by one of the member countries. As in Estonia all the development of the mentioned field is basically lying on the initiative of individuals and/or very small organisations and all the education of the teachers of the Deaf is unorganised on a state level, then becoming a member of FEAPDA is of very important value for us in order to be aware of the general trends in Deaf education in Europe and through that to be able to raise the quality of teaching in our country as well.

Besides KLÕPS, the members of FEAPDA include professional organisations from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxenbourg, Macedonia, Netherlands, Slovenia and Great Britain.

For more information about FEAPDA, please visit http://www.feapda.eu/