The meeting was attended by representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, United States, Australia, Colombia and Argentina. The group was welcomed by Marc Durando, Executive Director of European Schoolnet
From the EUN Office, Roger Blamire presented EUN’s report on ICT Impact which was published last year. The report was built on a gathering of 17 recent European large scale impact studies. The conclusion of the report is that ICT has in general, a positive impact on primary education in Europe with 90 per cent of teachers in the EU use ICT to prepare their lessons. For more information, see http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/misc/specialreports/impact_study.htm
Additionally Jim Ayre from the EUN Office presented the work European Schoolnet is doing to create a Learning Resource Exchange (http://lre.eun.org) which in 2008 will provide an open service for schools building on CALIBRATE (IST) and MELT (eContentPlus), two large scale commission-funded projects on digital content.
A Round Table followed; participants briefed attendees about the key new national development in their countries, as follows:
USA
Keith Kruger, Chief Executive Officer of the Consortium for School Networking in the US (CoSN) talked about VOI (Value on Investment), a CoSN initiative to supports effective use of technology in k-12 education. The aim is to provide a methodology and tools for k-12 schools leader allowing them to better articulate and understand the costs and benefits of proposed technology project. He also mentioned the political objective for next year: no Child Left Behind up for re-authorisation.
Denmark
Lilla Voss and Claus Berg, from UNI.C, Denmark talked about a new study due in February 2008 on the right to use ICT for students during examinations and about full access to Internet and resources for students. They mentioned that Teachers may not be ready for the 21st century learning; we need to help them get there via networking innovative schools and needs scaling internationally.
France
Odile de Chalendar, from the Ministry of Education, France, mentioned that policy objectives must include the definition of the 21st century in education for teachers and how to assess them. Additionally, several studies on the implementation in the classroom have been made but many young people still lack these competences. Odile deChalendar mentioned that this issue must be scaled at the European and international level because validation is needed.
UK
Vanessa Pittard and Gavin Dyke (both from BECTa) talked about personalisation and home access for students, bringing home to school and not just school to home. Gavin Dyke added that computers in the home make a big difference and can help disengaged/disadvantaged learners if parents are involved.
Lisa Petrides, President of ISKME the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education in the UK talked about OER Common, a teaching and learning network linked to a range of different repositories and networks created by ISKME. OER Commons focuses on the use of standards and on the principle that all users and creators are not interested in the same standard, and don’t look at everything from information research point of view.
Italy
Giovanni Biondi: talked about the changing environment in schools which are one of the main challenge for policy making at the moment. Various elements must be taken into consideration to change the school environment: the role of the teacher; blended eLearning approach for teacher training; result of teachers'. Digital content production is not necessarily very important comparing to digital assets.
Australia
Kathryn Moyle Director of the Australian Information and Communications in Technology Education Committee (AICTEC) Secretariat talked about the Australian political context with the change of government and the 'new leadership' driving future-oriented thinking. Digital economy and broadband are priorities in a country with a workforce skills shortage. There is also now an Australian department of innovation, industry, science and research to bring this together. Digital schools top priorities before Xmas for Australia are: standards, school performance community key and national testing she explained.
Garry Putland, General Manager, Business Development at Education.au Limited mentioned a large scale laptop scheme implemented by the new Australian Government for schools. Money comes from booming exports of mineral sales to china.
Latin America
Claudia Zea (MoE, Columbia), Elena Garcia (RELPE, Argentina), Alejandro Piscitelli (Educ.ar, Argentina), mentioned that Latin American countries represented at the GENIE meeting have a lot of experience in developing international portal since four years. There are already 18 portals and 4 more are planned for coming months. However, there is a need to improve their strategy to be capable to scale up. Until now, the pedagogical strategy is missing; they are in a phase of experimentation, they just put technology in place to see what happens. At this step of the process, teachers and children are playing with these new tools but are not sure what the result will be. Many reports on putting infrastructure in schools are disappointing. Latin American experts try to find solutions to improve ICT in education process in their countries. For them, technologic reductionism is not enough
For further information about GENIE, please contact Alexa Joyce at alexa.joyce@eun.org.
