23 members of the ICT Cluster, representing 14 countries, took part in the PLA. The programme provided three days of varied inputs on a range of themes and included visits to three primary and two secondary schools and the Technolink Schoolnetwork centre, which is a government-supported ICT service for primary and secondary schools in the city of Luxembourg.

Luxembourg, the second smallest country in Europe, enjoys stable investments in education. Schools are well-funded and well-equipped, including ICT. Some reforms have been initiated, e.g. giving more autonomy to schools, developing new concepts of learning and teaching and standards for competence based learning.

The mySchool portal provides core services to all school in Luxembourg. The recently developed sub services such as the eBac, a blended learning service for adult education, and eRemEdation have been presented to the ICT cluster members. The eRemEdation portal is a service for students with learning difficulties and aims to reduce drop-out rates in schools.

During the school visit cluster members were particularly impressed by students creating “MiniBooks”. This is a piece of software developed by the Technolink centre of the city of Luxembourg and freely available to all schools in and out of Luxembourg. It enables learners to combine text, graphics, photos, video and audio to create stories or reports and produce a printed minibook.

Another highlight of the Peer Learning Activity was the visit to The Lycée Aline Mayrisch. It is one of the biggest secondary schools in Luxembourg where every student has a laptop.  The “electronic school bag” has been introduced in 2001 and is part of a pedagogical concept to implement a new school culture.

ICT cluster members took home a variety of ideas and points to follow up by their ministries. Some of the key findings of the peer included early age language learning in Luxembourg. Due to the three languages of Luxembourg (Lëtzebuergisch, German and French), languages are acquired generally at an early age and introduced as language of instruction at different levels of education. This early focus on languages helps the integration of the different nationalities which make 40 % of the country's population.

Other key findings included the value of a unified system and single learning platform/portal: mySchool. The portal has developed from a service supporting the integration of school intranets towards a service-oriented architecture. It is positioned as the main vehicle within a learning network for both internal and external users to access and share information and knowledge and collaborate on all aspects of education.

A report summarising the PLA and the findings and experiences of participants is been drafted by European Schoolnet who is also responsible for the final report.

Background papers and visit documentation can be seen at http://www2.myschool.lu/home/pla/documents.asp