Issue 3 - February 2007

In Focus

EUN has published a major report on ICT impact on schools in Europe. The report, written in the framework of the ICT Cluster of the European Commission, draws on the evidence from 17 recent impact studies across Europe. It identifies 12 major findings concerning the impact of ICT on teaching and learning, identifies three types of barriers and makes 13 recommendations to policy-makers, educators and researchers.

The “impact studies’ in focus include a variety of studies, large and small scale, national and European, and cover evaluations of ICT programmes, inspection reports, specific technology interventions, research reviews, European comparisons and case studies.

The major focus of the report was to look at impact of ICT in schools on two main areas learning and learners and teachers and teaching. Further to this, it shows the barriers for effective ICT use as identified in the studies. The report likewise tackles the research methods used to reveal impact in the two areas of learning and teaching.

The ICT report analyses 17 studies on the impact of ICT at school
Picture credit: PhotoAlto

Based on the body of evidence the report then raises a couple of key questions to be addressed in the near future, such as: Is it sound policy to concentrate resources on ICT for those subjects and sectors where results are proven? or How can we tackle the growing divide between emature and e-immature schools?

Full article

Policy


P2V to kick off in Copenhagen P2V – Peer to Peer networking for Valorisation - will have its kick-off meeting on 21-22 February 2007 in Copenhagen. The event is organised in conjunction with the Policy and Innovation Committee meeting on 22-23 February 2007. The meeting will bring together the nine partners of the project. P2V aims to apply the peer learning methodologies developed in the P2P project to the topics of media literacy, digital content and new learning environments. Full article		The use of ICT, games and mobile technology in the New Member States The emapps.com project has published a major deliverable containing three surveys on the status and use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the New Member States including games and mobile technology. The report provides the baseline data for the emapps.com project, which is now in its second year and generates a specific set of requirements for the developing and use of games and mobile technology in schools. Full article
Pan European survey on ICT use at school A study commissioned by DG Information Society and Media reports that while 2/3 of EU schools benefit from broadband access to the internet – giving them access to higher quality content – there are still important discrepancies between member states. ‘Benchmarking Access and Use of ICT in European Schools 2006’ presents the results of two surveys carried out in spring 2006: a head teacher survey of more than 10,000 school heads with a focus on information about the schools and a survey of more than 20,000 teachers focusing on their use of ICT. Full article		UK - ICT policy, progress and key facts In March 2005 the Department for Education and Skills published its ambitious e-strategy 'Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services'. The strategy describes the use of digital and interactive technologies to achieve a more personalised approach within all areas of education and children's services. Almost two years have passed since the strategy was launched and it is worth looking at what has been achieved in a country that comes well off in recent international comparisons such as the Eurobarometer Benchmarking survey. Full article

Interoperability


Round Table discussions on "Roadmap to eLearning Interoperability" On 7 December, about 50 participants convened to discuss the issues of adoption of learning technologies and the arising issues that touch upon the underlying interoperability aspects, both the technological and semantic ones, as well as the political will to tackle them. Full article		EUN presents MINOR at eMapps.com workshop in Ljubljana In October 2006, EUN released the first version of MINOR: An open-source repository of learning resources and metadata. MINOR was presented for the first time to the eMapps teachers on 7 November 2006 during a workshop organised in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Full article

School Practice


New Calibrate Schools showcase ICT in school usage Available on Insight and on the Calibrate mini-site is the Calibrate School Gallery. Regularly new schools are presented in this section from the 70 schools in the Calibrate project. In this newsletter we present the elementary school Josefa Mareše a nursery school in the Czech Republic. Full article		Educnet publishes ICT in school videos Educnet, the education portal of the French Ministry of Education, has released 17 videos, available for direct streaming, showcasing how ICT can be effectively used in classroom environments. The videos (in French), are a useful tool for practitioners as well as policy makers to see the benefits and identify the challenges of ICT in schooling. Full article
Technolink Schoolnetwork Centre offers high quality support to schools European Schoolnet visited the Technolink centre in Luxembourg during a Peer Learning Activity (PLA) organised by the European Commission DG EAC’s ICT cluster in September 2006. Among the many initiatives that were presented and showcased around the issue of collaboration, the Technolink centre was a remarkable project in terms of the high quality services it provides for teachers in schools. Over 90 percent of teachers use the centre. Full article		Young people struggle to maintain their privacy online 57% of young people make their online social network profiles public and disclose a great deal of personal information, according to a recent survey of 21,872 people across Europe organised by European Schoolnet, coordinator of European Insafe network. Almost a third of youngsters responding indicated that they didn’t know what to do about making information public or private. However, in other areas, awareness of safe behaviour is increasing. Full article

Thematic Dossiers: e-assessment


The four changing faces of e-assessment 2006-2016 This article examines progress to date in e-assessment. It extrapolates from current activities and trends to make some predictions about how e-assessment might evolve in the next decade as significant progress was achieved in this area in the years from 2001-2006. Full article		Diagnostic tools from the Netherlands Four in balance team test and the Ict-Assessment tool Kennisnet Ict op School developed a model that provides support for an effective adoption and efficient use of ict in schools. This model is called ‘Four in Balance’ and describes four building blocks that schools should be aware of when implementing ict in education. Full article


About European Schoolnet European Schoolnet (EUN) is a unique not-for-profit consortium of 28 ministries of education in Europe created in 1997. EUN provides major European education portals for teaching, learning and collaboration and leads the way in bringing about change in schooling through the use of new technology. European Schoolnet is at the crossroads of national and regional education networks, building synergies between communities of teachers, learners, developers, researchers and policy-makers. Newsletter services: Subscribe/unsubscribe: write to insight-newsletter-request@listserv.eun.org with "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject.		About Insight Insight is a service of European Schoolnet focusing on e-learning in schools in Europe. It is EUN's Observatory for Innovation and Education, publishing news and analysis on e-learning policies, school innovation and information communication technology (ICT) in education. The Insight newsletter Insight Newsletter aims to give a quick overview of the latest articles, reports and documents published on Insight. Please pass on the news to your networks and contacts who you think might be interested. We would also like to invite you to complete a short survey to know more about your needs and to continuously improve the format of this newsletter.

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