The final meeting of the P2V (Peer to peer learning for Valorisation) WorkPackage 6, dedicated to the inspection and the evaluation of the use of ICT in schools in Europe, took place in Brussels on 22 and 23 September 2008. The Standing International Conference of Inspectorates (SICI) workshop gathered all the inspectors from Sweden, Scotland, France, Catalonia, Lithuania and The Netherlands who participated in the visits to 25 schools based in these countries.

Another series of the Insight country reports is available online. The focus of the annual update, compiled with the help of policy makers in the 31 member countries of EUN, is to present trends with regard to new technologies in school education. Reports from Austria, Norway and Israel, besides three special reports from the US (Arizona, Indiana and Wisconsin) are food for thought for the school year.

Among the freshly published country reports, Insight presents as a brand new entry, three reports coming from the US. Although not covering the whole US territory, the data and information provided by the states of Arizona, Indiana and Wisconsin sketch a picture of the main trends and up-to-date working methods currently on oversea.The publication of these snapshots has been made possible thanks to the cooperation with the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) of the United States.

Are laptops for students one of the priorities of policy programmes in the different European education systems? How is their use implemented on the ground? This short overview, gathering all the available information from the Insight country reports and beyond, sketches a picture of the state-of-the-art of laptop programmes involving students, as in Europe most of them have so far been targeting teachers.

The proceedings of SIRTEL'08 and SE@M’08, two workshops ran by European Schoolnet at the third European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'08), have been published and are now available online respectively at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-382 and http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-385. EC-TEL’08 was held in Maastricht (the Netherlands) on 17 September 2008.

eLearning Papers has just released a new collection of articles on one of the most interesting issues of the moment, Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are learning and teaching materials offered freely to anyone under licenses that allow to use, modify and distribute the items.

European Schoolnet was among invited experts at the Learning 2.0 validation workshop organised by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPST) in Sevilla in October 2008. The objective of this one year long study is to assess the impact of Web 2.0 trends on the field of learning and education in Europe, and to propose avenues for further research and policy-making in Europe.

To open this school year, eTwinning welcomed its teacher community to a brand new web 2.0 portal and published its latest handbook for teachers, entitled “eTwinning: Adventures in languages and culture”. It provides teachers with inspiration and a look into the endless possibilities that exist in eTwinning to incorporate language and culture in any subject area.

After four and a half years, the iClass project - one of the largest projects funded by the European Commission DG Information Society to create an intelligent Distributed Cognitive-based Open Learning System for schools - came to an end in July 2008. European Schoolnet (EUN) has gathered the results in a booklet titled ‘The Future of Learning? Results from the iClass project'. The final tasks in the project were validation workshops in Budapest, Hungary, and Toruń, Poland.

Schools in Europe have now got unprecedented access to ICT tools to support teaching and learning. However, research indicates that many educational institutions fail to make full use of their ICT facilities, while at the same time ICT still has the potential for a positive impact on education systems. A report published by European Schoolnet, "eMature schools in Europe", highlights the need for schools to reach a point of maturity in their use of ICT ("eMaturity").

European Schoolnet is currently undertaking a major European study on games in schools, financed by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe. Electronic games are defined in a broad sense, including video games, computer games, online games that run on consoles, computers, handhelds or mobile phones. The aim of the study is to investigate to what extent games are used in schools across Europe, generate awareness and provide practical examples and guidance for teachers, policy makers and the games industry.

This report contains a literature review that was completed as part of Work Package 2 of the ISFE-EUN Partnership work plan – Games in Schools. Specifically, “to analyse the use of video games as a educational tool, drawing upon existing research, with the aim of identifying how to build up young people’s key competence of digital literacy (more critical and responsible in their video games use)” and to identify the state of educational gaming in schools. Examples of games utilised have been highlighted from the literature, and frameworks for using Game-Based Learning (GBL) have been discussed.

Insight (http://insight.eun.org) is a service of European Schoolnet (EUN), a network of 31 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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