Survey of Schools: ICT in Education

Based on over 190,000 responses from students, teachers and head teachers collected and analysed during the school year 2011-12, the Survey of Schools: ICT in Education provides detailed, up-to-date and reliable benchmarking of Information and Communication Technologies in school level educationacross Europe, painting a picture of educational technology in schools: from infrastructure provision to use, confidence and attitudes. The Survey was commissioned in 2011 by the European Commission (Directorate General Communications Networks, Content and Technology) to benchmark access, use and attitudes to ICT in schools in 31 countries (EU27, Croatia, Iceland, Norway and Turkey). The Survey is one of a series within the European Union’s cross-sector benchmarking activities comparing national progress towards the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) and EU2020 goals. The Survey was conducted in partnership between European Schoolnet and the University of Liège (Service d’Approches Quantitatives des faits éducatifs, Department of Education). It is the first Europe-wide exercise of this type for six years, following the eEurope 2002 and eEurope 2005 surveys. It is the first to be conducted online and the first to include students directly. Work on the survey took place between January 2011 and November 2012, with data collection in autumn 2011. The survey report and all related materials are freely available on the European Commission’s Digital Agenda Scoreboard website1. In four countries (Germany, Iceland, Netherlands and the United Kingdom) the response rate was insufficient, making reliable analysis of the data impossible; therefore the findings in this report are based on data from 27 countries.http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/survey-schools-ict-educatio

Sciences education: mobile resources for holistic learners

INTACT (Interactive Teaching materials Across Culture and Technology), a multilateral Comenius Project involving six different countries develops interactive teaching and learning resources for bilingual education in different science fields and provides them on an online platform developed that allows synchronous, collaborative work at different locations on a shared task. The online platform can also be used as repository and facilitator. Teachers can easily combine existing resources with the developed ones and thereby create new scenarios tailored for their classroom. The project has created and implemented reliable teaching resources for Mathematics, Geography, Technology, Primary Science, Secondary Science and Environmental Education with the aim to promote a culture of collaboration among students and an interactive approach to learning inside and outside the classroom. Since the technological requirements in schools are diverse, the teaching resources will be implemented in HTML 5, thus ensuring independence of specific hard- or software. Society is in permanent mutance and education, particularly, the education in sciences, must follow this dynamics e answer to the current demands. The aim is to invest in holistic, scientifically informed citizen, who are capable of adapting to the demands of the modern society. By providing digital interactive resources, the INTACT project is an asset for both students and teachers, since it allows access to several ideas and suggestions to work on sciences in different contexts and, as such, contribute to significative learning in a bilingual setting. Our resources are attractive, dynamic and intuitive, thus showing an original and innovative approach meeting children’s and adolescents’ expectations in a language they are used to on their mobile gadgets. The topics approach relevant questions associated with a variety of phenomena belonging to everyday lives, privileging Sciences in the STS perspective (Sciences-Technology-Society-Environment). From the methodological point of view this appears as an essential approach to basic concepts and representations which are a pillar to a more comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of Science and Technology. In this way education in sciences supports the increase of literacy in Children and young people

Hybrid Design Tools - Image Quality Assessment of a Digitally Augmented Blackboard Integrated System

In the last two decades, Interactive White Boards (IWBs) have been widely available as a pedagogic tool. The usability of these boards for teaching disciplines where complex drawings are needed, we consider debatable in multiple regards. In a previous study, we proposed an alternative to the IWBs as a blackboard augmented with a minimum of necessary digital elements. The current study continues our previous research on hybrid design tools, analyzing the limitations of the developed hybrid system regarding the perceived quality of the images being repeatedly captured, annotated, and reprojected onto the board. We validated the hybrid system by evaluating the quality of the projected and reprojected images over a blackboard, using both objective measurements and subjective human perception in extensive and realistic case studies. Based on the results achieved in the current research, we conclude that the proposed hybrid system provides good quality support for teaching disciplines that require complex drawings and board interaction

Interactive Teaching Across Culture and Technology

Remember the time when you had a teacher in front of a blackboard endlessly talking, sometimes in a rambling way to students? Those days are gone. This project is a proof of that and aims at palliating students’ boredom. Interactive Teaching Materials across Culture and Technology (INTACT) intends to present an alternative way in the teaching paradigm as it intends to be a resourceful tool in the teaching/learning process. Both teachers and students can work together cooperatively and collaboratively, two different ways well explained by Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó further ahead. Teachers will no longer become the centre of learning but they will become guides and facilitators throughout all the learning process. Students can learn from their teachers but the latter can also learn from the former. The novelty here is that learners are engaged online in a different set of activities and among students. Therefore, the INTACT platform caters for an online collaborative learning community comprised of both students and teachers. As Sarolta Lipóczi so well puts it, the crux of the matter is ‘learning to learn too’. The teaching paradigm is changing and we are witnessing different approaches and techniques in pedagogical matters. In this context, at the basis of the INTACT project is a display of a wide array of new techniques and methodologies that account for active learning based on multimodal teaching and learning resources. Students will thus interact cognitively and in a constructivist way with different materials, such as visuals, texts, audio, to name a few. INTACT offers students and teachers options so that they can choose several actions in the course of the learning unit, for instance watch, browse, select, compare and manipulate all the resources available. Bearing in mind this short introduction to the project, in Part 2 Mary Glynn and Ildikó Szabó give us a better definition of INTACT and the educational arguments underlying its foundation. They also focus on the difference between collaborative and cooperative learning and on the importance of bilingualism and the advantages of CLIL, now one of the trendiest bilingual teaching methods, In part 2, we find a sample of resources ranging from Biology to second language learning. In the first learning unit, Toni Cramer and Steffen Schaal from the University of Education-Ludwigsburg, Germany, conceived an 8-lesson unit plan on the Human Immune System. Through these 8 lessons, students will learn how to explain blood types, to describe the parts of the human immune system model and collect data and interpret the spreading of diseases using adequate simulations, among other useful knowledge. The second and the third learning units are targeted at primary school students. The authors’ main purpose, Mary Glynn, from St. Patrick’s College in Dublin and Mariangeles Caballero from Universidad Complutense – Faculty of Education in Madrid, respectively, is to enhance students’ knowledge on science and technology by exploring and applying scientific ideas and concepts. Magnetism and the Human Circulatory system are therefore the proposals presented by the authors. Framed in the Geography programme of the 7th grade of the 3rd cycle of the basic education, for a target audience aged 12-13 years old, Maria Antónia Martins, from Emídio Garcia Secondary School in Bragança-Portugal, conceived the fourth learning unit on Elements and Climate factors regarding the Translational Motion and the Seasons of the Year. The temperature element was chosen to be studied throughout 3 lessons. In the course of these, students should not only be capable of relating the diurnal and annual variation of the temperature according to the movements of the earth but also to understand the relation between the annual variation of the temperature and the latitude of the place. The fifth and the sixth learning units aim at improving foreign language and social skills while at the same time students are taken back in time, thus broadening their knowledge on culture and history. Through the most suggestive title: ‘Legends and heroes – To be a Knight in King Arthur’s court’, Ildikó Szabó, from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty in Hungary, takes us on a tour through medieval times meeting the needs of several learning styles, such as acoustic, kinaesthetic and visual. Sarolta Lipóczi, also from the Kecskemét College, Teacher Training Faculty, conceived the sixth learning unit titled ‘Mozart as a child and his travels’ a way to learn German as a foreign language. In this unit, primary school students are given the story of a famous musician born in Austria. Students thus develop cultural knowledge and language competences through exciting learning objects and activities. In part 3, Birgit May, Annika Jokiaho and Vítor Gonçalves, with the collaboration of José Exposto make a brief overview of the INTACT platform, explaining the methods adopted and highlighting more technical issues related to results achieved during the the project. Subchapter 3.2. reflects on good practices resulting from the whole project. It also records the national teams’ experience in working with the others for accomplishing the various tasks as well as the numerous unexpected and unavoidable problems that came up in the three years during which the project was completed. Being all said, we truly hope that this ebook can become an appetiser to the project, largely to make both students and teachers frequent users of the interactive platform

Planning of INTACT: Interactive teaching materials across culture and technology

INTACT is a Comenius Project - Lifelong Learning Program of the European Union. This project aims to develop reliable teaching materials for Mathematics, Geography, Technology, Second Language learning, Primary Science and Environmental Education, Secondary Science and Environmental Education or other subjects in natural and social sciences to be used on such platforms as whiteboards, tablet-PCs and smart phones in order to promote a culture of collaboration among students and an interactive approach to learning. The INTACT platform will offer the possibility of creating and running Learning Units, which will be divided in Lessons, including several learning objects. Teaching materials are developed by experts in educational design from Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Romania and Spain and are thoroughly tested in pilot schools by experienced teachers

Generating Multimedia Components for M-Learning

The paper proposes a solution to generate template based multimedia components for instruction and learning available both for computer based applications and for mobile devices. The field of research is situated at the intersection of computer science, mobile tools and e-learning and is generically named mobile learning or M-learning. The research goal is to provide access to computer based training resources from any location and to adapt the training content to the specific features of mobile devices, communication environment, users' preferences and users' knowledge. To become important tools in education field, the technical solutions proposed will follow to use the potential of mobile devices.M-learning, mobile devices, MPEG-21 standard, multimedia databases

What kind of support for digital competence development do pre-service teachers expect?

The aim of this article is to answer the question on what kind of support future teachers expect in order to effectively use new media (information and communication technologies, ICT) in their teaching and educational work. The research is part of the current needs for change in education (including higher education), which are determined by the intensive development of the information society. The research was conducted in 2022 in four Polish universities (three state universities, one private university) educating future pedagogical staff. The survey covered 1002 students, analysing the areas of support they expect in order to use ICT effectively. On the basis of the analysis of qualitative data, 7 categories related to the need for support were identified in the following areas: development of basic digital competences, skills in using e-learning platforms, strengthening knowledge on the use of basic equipment such as interactive whiteboards, increasing awareness and skills in the correct use of educational software, information support on educational software, access to OER, strengthening the LLL process, and improving access to IT infrastructure. The research is linked to the project 'Teachers of the future in the information society-between risk and opportunity paradigms' PPN/BEK/2020/1/00176

Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages with Interactive Methods

The use of ICT in European Schools has increased over the last decade but there is still room for improvement. Also interactive technology is often used below its technical and pedagogical potentials. The pedagogical potential of interactive technology in classrooms has not yet reached classrooms in different countries and in a substantial way. To develop these materials cooperation between educational researchers and teachers from different backgrounds is necessary. This paper gives insight into a project work in the field of developing and implementing interactive teaching materials for several disciplinary areas in primary and secondary schools in European cooperation. INTACT project brings together experts from science education, mathematics education, social science education and foreign language education — with a focus on bilingual education — and teachers in secondary and primary schools to develop a variety of pedagogically qualitative interactive teaching and learning resources

Information and communication technologies in science education

AbstractThe advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) provide significant opportunities to improve teaching and learning. The use of ICT in science education offers even more advantages due to the attractive premises to simulate and interactively explore and test experiments which would be too expensive or too dangerous in real settings (for example in nuclear physics). The aim of this paper is to contribute to the research field of technology based learning by presenting several findings obtained during a multinational educational project (Comenius) regarding the use of computer in classroom, in science education, in Romania, Spain, Poland, Greece and Finland