Insight Blog

Following a first visit in the EUN Office in August 2007, a group of visitor from KERIS, the Korean agency for ICT in education, came to Brussels on 23-10-2007 to visit an innovative school as part of a study visit for directors of Korean regional learning centres part of KERIS.

The visit took place at Sint Pietercollege, a primary and secondary school in the north of Brussels with a bilingual campus French and Dutch. The visit took place in the Flemish secondary school which has some 850 pupils. Teo Jaspers was our host together with the head teacher and deputy head teacher of the school.

The visit started by the presentation of the school, the headmaster of the school gave an introduction of the school and the Flemish education system. After, participants had a presentation of the school’s new learning centre by Teo Jaspers. He explained how the school received a funding from the Flemish ministry of education for the primary and secondary school and merged it to be used for the Learning Centre based on Open Source thin clients connected to a server.

The learning centre’s PCs cost 300 euros each, a low cost as these PCs are thin clients which connect to a central server based on Linux. The thin clients (just a few centimeters large as shown on the picture below) do not incorporate unnecessary hardware such as video card, etc… just a motherboard and a LAN access. There are about 150 computers in the schools, about 1 for 4 pupils.

KERIS was impressed with the value for cost of the infrastructure.

Results of the Learning Centre will be inspected every 5 years as part of the regular school inspection scheme in Belgium. The Learning centre will be part of the evaluation that funds have been used for the best interest of pedagogy in the school

The school is currently developing a web based assessment scheme of pupils’ performance and grade, this will be available to teachers it is not planned yet that parents will access the system (name of the platform is SchoolOnline (http://schoolonline.sourceforge.net/ ). The school is also using a DLE: Moodle where courses are uploaded and used

Following the presentation of the learning centre, the Paul Gerhard from the EUN Office presented European Schoolnet and its activities in three strands of work including eLearning Awards, eTwinning, the Learning Resource Exchange project (LRE) currently been developed (this is one of the project which interested most KERIS as they are developing a similar federation of learning resources repositories in KOREA, see: KERIS August visit). Finally the EUN Office explained EUN activities around INSIGHT and Safer internet campaign.

The second part of the visit brought the group of visitor through the schools and in different classes to see lessons. The group had the opportunity to talk to pupils and professors. Following this, participants had a chat with a physics teacher who is teaching electronics using the new learning centre; he gave a very interesting session on how the various computers were used to develop complex electronic components used by the schools in projects it develops with ESA (European Space Agency).

The visit concluded by a drink and some present giving moments. Overall the visit was very positive both for the school, KERIS and EUN.

More information about the learning centre can directly been asked to Teo Jaspers,ICT coordinator (jjp@sint-pieterscollege.be).

Posted by Paul Gerhard at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The annual EU eLearning Conference took place in Lisbon on 15-16 October 2007. The event was attended by IT professionals, educators, software vendors, policy makers and featured an exhibition. The event took place in Portugal as the country currently holds the rotating EU presidency chair.

As in previous years the aim of the EUN visit was to identify best practices examples and projects in Europe which can be inspirational in order to learn from them. Here are some of the projects which were highlighted at the conference:

The Portuguese framework for ICT in Education: 'Technological Plan for Education'
This groundbreaking initiative aims to generalise the use of computers and the internet in the Portuguese schools. The plan which runs from 2007-2010 aims to achieve the following goals:

• To achieve the ratio of two students per computer with Internet connection in 2010.
  
• To ensure high-speed broadband Internet connection of, at least, 48 Mbps, in all
  schools by 2010.
  
• To ensure that, by 2010, teachers and students use ICT in at least 25 per cent of classes.
  
• To generalise the use of electronic communication means, making e-mail addresses
  available to every student and teacher by 2010.
  
• To ensure that, by 2010, 90 per cent of teachers have their ICT competencies certified.
  
• To certify 50 per cent of students in ICT by 2010.
  

Informal learning
At the conference, a session on informal learning highlighted the crucial role internet and new technologies play at home where children develop fascinating learning strategies. How to transfer this enthousiam, this intrinsic motivation to learn for curriculum-based subjects.

The session highlighted how informal learning is a precious gift that citizens must take advantage of and develop throughout all stages of life and in various contexts. Questions looked at during the session included:

• How can people access informal learning experiences?
  
• What social learning structures can integrate individual informal learning experiences?
  
• How do we validate and certify informally obtained competencies in order to include them in a personal
  portfolio?
  

Some projects which looked at informal learning and are of relevance include:
iClass: a large scale project to develop intrinsic motivation in learners by providing them with a platform to 'learn how to learn'
PENCIL: a three-year project to combine field programmes and academic research identifying ways to transform informal science activities into innovative quality tools for science teaching.

ePortfolio
European Schoolnet has been looking into the topic of ePortfolios for a long time and in the P2V project, one of the specific topic of the project is on New learning environments. The potential of ePortfolio has been widely acknowledged, whether to manage personal documents, CV or support learning and teaching. At the session in Lisbon the following topics were addressed:

• What uses can be given to an ePortfolio by students, teachers, trainers, teaching organisations or by
  human resource managers and knowledge and learning managers? What type of ePortfolio is more
  appropriate for each of them?
  
• How can ePortfolios trasnform the way we approach lifelong learning?
  
• What impact can an ePortfolio have on the pedagogical methods used in schools and on information
  systems?
  
• How can ePortfolio contribute to employability, mobility, validation of competencies and continuing
  professional development? What is the impact of an ePortfolio on individual and organisational
  development?
  

Posted by Paul Gerhard at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)