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

Collaborative approaches in initial teacher education: lessons from approaches to developing student teachers’ use of the Internet in science teaching

In many countries, governments are keen to persuade teachers at all levels to seek to enhance the learning of their students by incorporating information and communication technologies within their classrooms. This paper reports on the development of collaborative approaches to supporting use of the Internet by Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) science students on initial teacher education (ITE) courses in England, drawing on data from five higher education institution (HEI)–school partnerships across four years. A mixed-method approach was used, involving questionnaires, structured interviews, lesson observations and case studies. The outcomes of the first three years identified barriers to practice and suggested the need to develop more collaborative approaches to development. The focus of this paper is on examining ways in which university faculty tutors and mentors or cooperating teachers can work together with students on PGCE courses in developing practice. The lessons from this focus on the Internet, no longer a new technology, have enabled us to identify implications for HEI partnerships in ITE and suggest a need for further collaborative structures in order to support and develop practices, including those involving the innovative use of new technologies in the post-industrial society

Media Literacy in Italy

In Italy, the media literacy (ML) movement has a long grassroots tradition. Main actors are from civil society (academics, associations, church communities, teachers, media professionals, educators), with some growing support from local and national institutions. While digital literacy has stably entered the school system through funds, projects, and teaching resources aimed at improving students' digital skills, only recently has a more sociocultural view of digital technologies developed, thanks also to the National Plan for Digital School issued by the Ministry of Education in 2015. For the future, more commitment to developing the following three important directions is needed: conducting evaluative research on ML in order to have more evidence‐based knowledge of its impact on educational contexts, both formal and nonformal; enhancing training and producing quality resources for teachers and educators alike; fostering more coordination and networking among the various stakeholders involved in the field

Experiences with the Learning Resource Exchange for schools in Europe

Summary This paper reports on the experiences of the first large scale effort to share educational resources for schools in Europe. As such it does not address authoring or the use of learning resources, but provides experiences of interest to any organisation wishing to act as an educational content broker, matching supply with demand. Even though there are many educational resource repositories, they are many times inaccessible to teachers due to a number of reasons, such as not knowing about their existence, the different ways of describing the content, language barriers, etc. In order to overcome these difficulties, the Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) brings together educational content from trusted providers from all over Europe and makes it available again to interested parties. This requires the implementation of a number of technical solutions, including a so-called "federation of repositories" with a common application profile for the metadata standard used and its accompanying validation services. Concerning educational content, this paper reports on the use of open content licenses and the difficulties of implementing them; the indexing of content by experienced professionals and by casual users; automatic translation and automatic metadata generation, and perceived pedagogical benefits of the resources provided. By implementing and using a portal for the LRE, European teachers have obtained deeper insights in searching and browsing, finding the offered learning resources useful for the classroom and appreciating the cross-linguistic and cross-border use of content. The concept of an international portal was also considered as an important opportunity for cultural exchange and a way to broaden horizons in terms of getting new ideas for teaching from other countries