The school is located in a small town near the Austrian boarder, Znojmo. The school was created three years ago and has a strong focus on ICT-supported teaching and learning.

The school also welcomes foreign students, talented students and special needs pupils and has special integration/education programmes for them.

Pedagogy
The school has developed its pedagogy around the targets of developing the teaching of foreign languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Russian), focusing on special needs education and talented students while making the process of learning practical and motivating.

To achieve this ICT is used in lessons to look up information for studying and to make multimedia projects. Regarding equipment the school has wireless broadband internet. Pupils have access to computers mainly in the primary school level and in special training classrooms of the secondary school level (language classroom).

Pupils can use Whiteboards, Smartboards, visualizers, Turning Point System during lessons, this across all school subjects. “They help the teachers to make the lesson motivating and more interesting and understandable for pupils,” said Mr. Marek Vystčil, describing his schools to the Calibrate project.
 
Financial resources for ICT comes from projects from the Ministry of Education or from sponsorship of various computer companies, e.g. HP, our own sources, i.e. from our school budget for technical equipment

The school’s pedagogy is to help learners to see the relationship between the school curriculum and their real-life experience. Pupils, through the aid of group work and teams learn to think and solve problems and develop communication and presentation skills. The role of the teacher is that of a coach which assist and stimulate the learners’ interest to find explanations or answers to questions rising from their work on cross-curricular topics.
 
Special needs pupils
Josefa Mareše’s school was chosen to educate pupils with special needs, suffering from mental or physical disability. The school strives to integrate them fully into the “normal” life and the process of education. To achieve this ICT offers better and more possibilities and methods for special needs pupils.

Talented pupils
The school permanently screens pupils’ talents and enhance their development. Here again the goal of the school is to integrate talented pupils within the regular classrooms and not separate those pupils into special training classes.

The Calibrate project
Over 70 schools are taking part in the Calibrate project which aims to support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools. The work helps provide the framework for a New European Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) that will be launched by the EUN. Teachers participating in the project will be able to search for learning resources in this network of linked repositories via a CALIBRATE portal. calibrate.eun.org

Calibrate schools have submitted ‘self-portraits’ and are able to present themselves to other schools in the project and describe the use them make of new technologies in their school environment.

So far 20 schools are presented on Insight and every month new schools are added to the site. Additionally this Calibrate schools gallery is mirrored on the Calibrate site for teachers which contains thousands of free learning resources and assets from all over Europe for teachers to search and use. Calibrate is part of EUN efforts to build a federated Learning Resource Exchange where learning resources repositories from all over Europe will be searchable and accessible through a single platform and interface.

calibrate.eun.org