The meeting consisted in the morning of a visit to UCHIDA, a leading Japanese corporation providing solutions for teaching and learning in Japan. Meeting at UCHIDA was hosted by Noboru Ohkubo, Director and senior executive officer / Director General of marketing headquarters.

In the afternoon the visit carried on with presentations from European Schoolnet about the latest projects and achievements in three areas of work: Policy and practice; School services and Interoperability and content exchange.

The visit was organized by Pr. Tsuneo Yamada (Prof. and Dir. Department of International Collaboration of CODE). Other participants at the meeting included Hitoshi Nakagawa, a specialist of IWB, Yosuke Morimoto (Digital resources and standards) and Kumiko Aoki who participated in previous visit at European Schoolnet in 2007.

CODE presented the latest research in the use of Interactive Whiteboard and demonstrated interest in school collaboration projects such as eTwinning. The development of a federation of learning resources repositories by European Schoolnet echoed similar work developed at CODE with a launch of a similar initiative in Japan called ‘Gloss’ (http://gloss.code.u-air.ac.jp), which connects to other repositories in Asia such as the one of Keris in Korea.

UCHIDA corporation visit

The Uchida corporation provides innovative equipment for classrooms including digital whiteboards, LCD screens, module spaces, mobile and portable technologies adapted to any budget.

Noboru Ohkubo demonstrated some of the technologies and solutions he brings to schools. At the moment there is a strong drive and interest in the Japanese government for innovative technologies at school. Japan has been lagging behind in recent years, despite being a major global IT provider and consumer, but now new political impetus aims to bring classes up to speed with 21 century tools and technologies.

Mr Ohkubo is a prominent personality in Japan as regards new technologies in teaching and learning and specifically in linking schools needs and technological solutions provided by vendors (Panasonic, Epson), Uchida (physical infrastructure, teacher support, software solutions). His showroom is quite impressive with a MS surface-like device allowing demonstrating to visitors (teachers, policy makers, ministry of education) some of the latest solutions available on the market.

Two products attracted the EUN delegation’s attention including:

• Modular space kit: these are structures which can be easily adapted to any classroom space, allowing to install projects, screens, whiteboards, lamps, sound system and cabling, without been invasive to the classroom original walls (which can generally not been modified, nailed or drilled into).
  
• Portable interactive whiteboards: this is a US-designed product which has a lot of success in Japan. It consists of a very small projector and an interactive pen. The projector which can be hanged on a traditional blackboard using magnet. Teachers can use the pen just as a standard large IWB. This solution, explains Mr Ohkubo, has a lot of success with older teachers especially as the gap between older technology (magnetic chalk black board) and the new one, is narrower. Teachers feel more at ease and confident using it. Another very obvious reason for schools to choose this technology is the low cost and portability of the system.

LCD display
There is a political drive at the moment in Japan to install new generation TV screen compatible with digital TV signal. In effect, the government is pushing forward more the installation of TVs than computers or IWBs.

In 2011, Japan will switch entirely from analogue to digital and the government is using this opportunities to install in every classroom in Japan a DGTV enabled screen. Mr Ohkubo mentions the figure of 400,000 TVs to be installed in the coming years.

CODE – Open University of Japan

European Schoolnet presented recent activities in its network. The EUN presentation focused on latest developments in the following areas:

- Recent news from the consortium, new members and creation of working groups on IWB, LRE, Digital Skills, International symposium, etc...
- eTwinning 2.0
- Games in Schools study
- Learning Resource exchange

The exchanges of views were very fruitful particularly as regards international collaboration. Pr Yamada expressed interest in outcomes, and in future collaboration for instance as part of the GLOBE project. European Schoolnet provided CODE with all information to participate in the to-be-published compendium of networks. Additionally Tsuneo Yamada accepted to introduce EUN to another network, NICER, which focuses on school education.

Hitoshi Nakagawa showed some videos of innovative use of IWB in Japan, Pr Nakagawa manages teacher communities interested in IWB. He went on to speak about the government plans to introduce DGTV in all classrooms by 2011. 400bn yen are planned for this project. Little spending is dedicated to training and researching on the use of these new technologies in an educational context, and participants at the meeting confirmed that often in Japan: “The government says hardware first, see use after”. A comment from participants was that the government should think not only hardware but also applications.

Pr Nakagawa then showed the use of innovative technologies such as advanced camera which can decompose movements in a gym class, tablet PCs which connect to a central server managed by a teacher who can display on IWB each Tablet PC to whole class, or this innovative teacher who had the idea to use pupils as screen to project on them images in biology class showing bone structure.

However, still these examples, as often in Europe, are from pilot schools. To scale up use, Pr Nakagawa refers to the new curriculum which by 2011 will embed ICT in the curriculum and make it compulsory.

One important cultural difference with Europe he refers is that in Japan, the use of ICT is teacher centric, for instance digital textbooks are used by teachers to display a lesson on an IWB. This may be different from Europe where the DGT is used by pupils.

Follow-up actions

Follow-up actions will be the inclusion of CODE and NICER (school education) in the upcoming compendium of networks active in the fields of ICT in education as well as strengthening contacts between European Schoolnet and CODE/NICER.