2009/2010 Insight Country Reports published

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This initiative is one of the major activities undertaken by European Schoolnet to gather and analyse information on ICT in education for Ministries of Education across Europe.

The main aim of the reports is to foster the active information exchange between Ministries on ICT in education-related topics of common interest.

2009/2010 edition outlines five key areas:

1.The education context

2.ICT policies

3.ICT in the curriculum

4.Digital learning resources

5.Teacher education for ICT

Education Reform developments to respond to societal challenges

Reports from Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium (Flemish Community) and Norway show interesting developments in the area of education reform and key challenges for education, mainly responding to a changing societal and economic context for education.

Austria initiated the ‘new secondary school’ reform to focus on developing key competencies such as autonomy, responsibility, creativity, flexibility, communication and team skills and conflict solving abilities with 10 to 14 year old students.

In the Netherlands, where the curriculum lies within the responsibility of the school, schools will be asked in the future to modify their curriculum due to the changing population of students, representing a broader ethnic diversity.

New curricula should include lessons for citizenship as well as an increased focus on language and mathematics.

A major revision of the core curriculum in Belgium (Flemish Community) has been made since 2006.

This concerns cross curricular objectives, ICT, mother tongue, foreign languages, science and technology with specification of specific learning outcomes in these areas.

In Norway, the main changes concern a new national assessment system, a revised teacher education programme and new school management training for headmasters.

With the revised teacher education programme the Government is proposing a new programme for primary and lower secondary education with a stronger emphasis on subject knowledge and teaching skills, quality of studies and research orientation.

Enhance the use of ICT in schools to modernize education

Reports from Portugal, Spain and Italy underline an increased interest in enhancing the use of ICT in schools. The Spanish plan Escuela 2.0 aims at transforming the way students learn.

It is an ambitious nationwide ICT plan for schools, which tries to generalise the access to hardware and digital content in schools in order to pedagogically integrate ICT into school life.

As far as hardware is concerned, the project provides each fifth-grade pupil with a notebook computer and their classrooms have an interactive whiteboard as well as a wireless connection.

The main objective of the Portuguese Technological Plan for Education, involving enterprises, families and institutions, is to modernise Portuguese schools technologically. The Digital School action plan has been introduced to support and spread ICT tools and methodologies in Italian schools.

ICT pilots and experiments to foster new learning environments

In Switzerland, Personal Smartphones are given to a primary school (Projectschool Goldau). All fifth-form pupils (age group 11-12) are given an Apple iPhone 3G for them to use in and out of school as a part of their personal learning environment between August 2009 and July 2011.

The project is being supervised and evaluated by the Institut für Medien und Schule (IMS) of the Pädagogische Hochschule Zentralschweiz - Schwyz (PHZ Schwyz). It is sponsored by Swisscom and does not entail any extra costs for school, pupils or parents.

In France, digital textbooks have been made available on virtual learning environments in order to reduce the weight of pupils’ schoolbags, develop the use of ICT, and help create tomorrow’s multimedia digital textbooks.

Since September 2009, the French Ministry of Education has been carrying out this experiment in 12 académies (local education authorities – there are 30 académies in France).

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