Issue 4 - August 2007

In Focus

Dutch autonomy and accountability highlighted
in Insight country report

The focus of the annual update of the Insight country reports, compiled with the help of policy makers in the 28 member countries of EUN, is to present trends with regard to new technologies in school education.

The Netherlands has consistently led the way in innovation and the developments highlighted in the report written by Bert Jaap van Oel, Dutch Inspectorate for Education and Keimpe de Heer, Kennisnet Ict op School confirm this position. Kennisnet Ict op School is the public organisation set up in February 2006 to support the implementation of ICT in education. Under the motto “learning to renew with ICT” it develops expertise, produces new content and supports educational renewal with ICT.

Governance, decentralisation, school autonomy
In recent years education in The Netherlands has moved towards increasingly decentralised governance. This is to enable a bottom-up approach for policy making in education where education itself provides the input and the structure for policy making issues and stakeholders are empowered and their voice heard more strongly.

Dutch country report highlights recent policy developments
in The Netherlands

In primary education the system of ‘lump sum’ financing has been put into place. This financial structure enables more financial responsibility for the school itself. In secondary education the organisation of learning has changed, reflecting changes within the national educational programme.

Full article

Policy


Lithuania: First P2V policy peer learning visit 23 participants from five countries, partners in the P2V project (Peer to Peer networking for Valorisation), participated in the first policy visit to Vilnius, Lithuania on 18-20 June 2007. The meeting was organised by the Lithuanian Centre of Information Technologies of Education (ITC) and addressed the issue of digital resources, one of the three key areas of the P2V project (the other two being digital literacy and new learning environments). Full article		ICT in Schools: Trends, Innovations and Issues in 2006-2007 This paper provides an overview of the situation of ICT in schools in the years 2006 and 2007. It focuses on four areas including the state and progress of ICT infrastructure and use; the results of the impact of ICT in schools; examples of national policies and innovations; and issues for schools. The use of ICT in education and training has been a priority in most European countries during the last decade, but progress has been uneven. Full article
National and European Initiatives to promote science education in europe The aim of this briefing paper is to present recent national initiatives to improve the quality of science education in schools in Europe and to encourage more students to study science. Information comes from EUN´s Insight country reports on ICT in education, which had a main focus on science education in 2006; examples are given from ten European countries. Full article		Insight Country Reports 2007– results of updates expected in September EUN´s Insight country reports are currently being updated by Ministries of Education, members of European Schoolnet and other key organisations. The new questionnaire was launched in May 2007 and new reports will appear on the Insight website in September 2007. Full article

Interoperability


Folksonomies, social bookmarking and tagging: the state-of-the-art Folksonomies and social tagging are an often cited example of Web 2.0, but what are they actually? How does social bookmarking differ from conventional bookmarks and what do folksonomies constitute of? Full article		Creation of Lithuanian digital library of educational resources and services The notions of digital library of educational resources and services (DLE) and its main components are presented in the article. DLE is considered here to be the aggregate of knowledge repositories and services organized as complex information system. Full article

School Practice


Spotlight on Calibrate schools Profiles of 14 schools have been recently added to the Calibrate gallery which includes self-portraits of nearly 75 schools participating in the project. The profiles have been drawn up by the schools themselves and include information concerning the role of ICT in respective schools as well as a brief description of the activities the schools have been involved with. Full article		Interactive Whiteboards introduced in a Belgian Catholic Primary School A number of countries, such as the UK (more than 30,000 schools), France, Spain (3,000 schools), Germany (5,000 schools), Poland (1,500 schools) have introduced interactive whiteboards in the last few years. Other countries such as Denmark and Austria are planning to do so in the near future. Full article
Scenario building in education A scenario building tool was presented in the EUN Office on 5 July 2007. Scenarios are useful to give a glimpse of future directions in the education area. Although frequently used in the business sphere, scenarios are uncommon in education contexts. Scenarios can help to ‘frame the future’ and analyse how today’s decision can have an impact on the school of tomorrow. The presentation was carried out by Lex Stomp and Carly Klein of Windesheim University of Professional Education in Zwolle, the Netherlands and focused on the concept of writing scenarios for education. Full article		New eTwinning Handbook 2007 Following the success of last year’s first edition, a new eTwinning book was recently published. The new ‘Learning with eTwinning: A Handbook for Teachers’ is now available in print and online. The aim of this book is to give teachers comprehensive information on what it means to be involved in an eTwinning project and resource to get started as well as to find out about some of Europe’s top projects from the 2005-2006 school year. Full article

Thematic Dossiers: Policy and Practice


PIC looks at relationship between policy and practice Representatives of the EUN’s Policy and Innovation Committee (PIC) met in Brussels on 13 June 2007 for the second PIC meeting of the year. The event was organised in connection with the EUN Steering Committee meeting on 14 June. Eighteen PIC representatives from 11 countries took part in the discussions. The theme of the meeting was the link between policy and practice; discussions also focused on the plans to strengthen EUN’s work on school practice. Full article		New dossier on links between policy and practice On Insight, EUN's Observatory for New Technology and Education, a new thematic dossier on the links between theory and practice will be published in the autumn. Resulting from the work and discussions at the EUN's Policy and Innovation Committee in June 2007, the thematic dossier will take several examples showing how policy influence practice and how practice can provide inspiring ideas to policy making, especially in a European context.

In the Insight Library

Harnessing Technology schools survey 2007

The Harnessing Technology schools survey is an annual, nationally representative survey intended to assess the uptake of ICT in schools across England...

View PDF file - English

Impact of e-portfolios on learning

Becta commissioned researchers from the Learning Science Research Institute, University of Nottingham, to investigate the impact that e-portfolios can have on learners...

View PDF file - English

A survey of young people and social networking sites

More and more older people appear to be struggling with the integration of two separate worlds, the real world and the virtual one, as they see the advantages of new means of communication...

View PDF file - English

About Insight

Insight (http://insight.eun.org) is a service of European Schoolnet (EUN), a network of 28 Ministry of education in Europe providing major European education portals for teaching, learning and collaborating among European schools.

Insight 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.

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